My mother will not return motel room keys, the card variety, because, “you never know what information about you they put in those things.” Do hotels put personally identifiable information in the keys? What do they put in there? I thought it was just a room number and the time it was allowed to get in the room. It doesn’t make any sense to me that they would put your name cc # etc on a card key. I think she also thinks they put when you use the key on the card as well.
Why on earth would they do that? (and anyway, if you paid by credit card, they have your details already)
AFAIK, the cards work something like this:
They are programmed with a session ID number that is unique to your stay, the unit on the door is programmed to open only to the card bearing your session ID number (and maybe some master key cards) - when someone else stays in the same room, they are issued another card with another session ID and the door unit is programmed to open for them.
Your mother is being unduly paranoid, but you’ll never persuade her.
Here’s what Snopes says:
The only personal information on the Key cards are your name and room number. Credit card and other information is not placed on the magnetic key strip. It is used for security purposes. When an incident in the room occurs to tell when and who went into the room and at what time.
If your mother wants to get rid of any information on the strip, she can just rub a magnet over the strip and it will demagnetize the strip and lose any information held on it.
They already have everything about you in the reservation computer and/or the check-in form. Why would they put it on a little card?
Besides which, my hotel stays are so unexciting that tracking them would be incredibly boring. Woo! I opened the door to the room. Then I opened the side door of the hotel (to get my stuff) and opened the room again. That morning, I wandered down to find food, wandered back up to get my stuff, and then checked out. Woo! I’ll be in trouble if they ever find that out!
At the hotel where I work, the key machine is completely separate from the computer where your personal info is stored. The only data I put onto a key are:
A) The room number.
B) If I am issuing multiple keys, whether this is Key#1 or Key#2 etc.
C) How many nights the keys will be active.
When you use a new key for the first time, it resets the lock so that previous occupants cannot come back and steal your stuff. I don’t know for sure, but I guess it involves some sort of “session number” like Mangetout described.
Each of the housekeepers and maintenance mens keys has its own ID code. If a guest accuses the staff of stealing, the manager can take a reading of the lock and see which keys have been used and when.
Minor hijack - how is the information describing which key cards are valid communicated to the door locks? Wired connections running through the doors? Wireless?
Ditto gotpasswords’ question.
But, are you sure your granny’s just paranoid? Unless I’m at hotel where I have to walk out through the lobby, I keep the key cards too. I just walk out the door closest to my car, and leave. I could leave the key card in the room, but it’s usually in my wallet, forgotten, until the next time I need my wallet.
I hate it when I’m all ready to write a “what-the-hell-are-you-stupid?” style response only to realize I’m not sure I’ve got it right but…
Each lock has it’s own code. When the key is made at the desk they determine which door the key is for. The key itself is the connection.
Also, I used to work in a hotel and one of the most common problems people had with keys ( aside from losing them which is one reason key cards are much safer than a piece of metal with the room # on it) was that the card would be demagnitized. Often people claimed their card was demagnitized simply by placing it on top of the Television. Want to thwart the crooks, just leave your key on the TV. Better yet, cut it in half and throw it away… the hotel has more and the price is already built into the price of the room. EEDI
That can’t be right. How does the lock know which keys have expired, if it has an unchanging code?
For example: Person A checks into the hotel. He’s given card A, which unlocks room 10. He checks out the next day, taking the card with him (either by accident or deliberately).
Then person B checks into the hotel. He’s given card B, which unlocks room 10.
If the lock has an unchanging code, then card A would still open room 10. But we know that it doesn’t.
Ed
I always assumed that there must be a pair of wires running to each lock, but a check of the Ving Card web site says that no wires are required, that “guests block out all previous guests the first time they insert their keycard in the lock.”
My girlfriend and I had a run in with this last month in Las Vegas at one of the major hotels. I can tell you for a fact that room access information is stored in the locking mechanism itself, not the key card. Your mother is accomplishing nothing other than stealing a nearly worthless plastic card.
suranyi, what if the card stores its own expiration date?
I’m questioning this myself, but only because I know that a key ccard can be deactivated. I still think the card is the connection and I know that some systemes operate without a conncetion between the card “maker” and the lock other than the key itself. I’m a little preoccupied right now, but I think the answer is out there
Each door lock has a battery. The battery powers a machine that reads and stores the info on the card. When the battery dies, the lock no longer works.
There is some other stuff that goes on with lock systems but basically that is it.
The next generation of this will be the hotel using your credit card as your room key. lee I don’t know what your mom is going to do then.
Wait! I’ve got it. The solution is:
Given digits N and M where 1 <= N <= 9 and 0 <= M <= 9 and the number (10N+M) representing any possible two digit number then (10N+M) - (N+M) --> 10N +M -N -M --> 10N- N --> 9N and therefore N will always be a multiple of 9 <= 81.
Ooops.
Too bad I’m a little slow on the draw. These damn paying jobs are so distracting.
To expand on what I wrote earlier. We had a theft from the room. Security had to bring a reader to read the room access from the lock. In other words, this information was only stored in the lock. If it was in the main hotel computer or on the key card itself, they would have no need to read the access from the lock.
Again, this was at one of the major hotel/casinos on the Strip, so I’m guessing the technology was fairly current although certainly retrofitted. I would think that a brand new hotel would have the door locks linked into the main computer system.
A couple of things.
The timing on the lock is also set by the information on the key. As has been mentioned, I believe, your room key will continue to work after you check out, or until an over riding key has been used. ( Or until the battery in the lock dies or the card gets demagnitized or…etc. etc.) If you extend your stay, you may even need to get new keys-- really, the desk could just run your same card back through the “maker.”
Also, I think, the ONLY way to deactivate a key is to bring an over riding key to the lock and use it. A key cannot be deactivated from the desk unless the lock is connected in some way to the card “maker”-- which most (the vast majority?) are not.
In at least one of the hotels in which I stayed (in Denmark or Sweden IIRC), the lock units on the doors were more than just simple battery-operated card readers - they were networked somehow to the computer issuing the key cards; I lost my key card and they issued a new one, then I found the original, but it didn’t work any more.
SiXSwords close, kind of. The keys has info on the mag stripe. It says something like, this key expires in 18 hours. The computer in the lock holds this info and starts a countdown of sorts. If you check out early and someone new checks into the room, as long as the card holds the information necessary, it works, overrides the previous info and starts a new countdown. If you extend your stay, your key will have to be updated.
RogueRacer, while lock systems may interface to the hotel’s front office system, the only way to get info from the lock is to interrogate it. The fewer people who can do this, the less likely manipulation of the data. When you are talking about hundreds of dollars in valuables, you want systems in place that ensure the information cannot be fixed. If every desk person had access to reading locks, well, the liability could be outrageous.
Ah, I think I understand now. Using my earlier scenario of persons A and B:
Each card has some sort of ID number in addition to the lock code.
When card B is inserted into the lock, it has the correct lock code, but a different ID number than had been used previously (by lock A). So the lock resets itself to block access by the card with the old ID.
It could also work with an expiration date encoded on the card, as someone else said.
Ed