New Credit Cards May Leak Personal Information

[Leichter, Jerry]

| New Credit Cards May Leak Personal Information
| http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070216/tc_pcworld/129096;_ylt=A0WTUeOD9tVFrwkA7SwjtBAF
| 
| from above:
| 
| You may be carrying a new type of credit card that can transmit your personal
| information to anyone who gets close to you with a scanner.
| 
| The new cards--millions of which have been issued over the past year--use
| RFID, or Radio Frequency Identification, technology. RFID allows scanners to
| use radio signals at varying distances to read information stored on a
| computer chip. 
| ... snip ...
This was reported a couple of months back.  (In fact, if you follow
the links, they get you to a draft version of the report from October
of last year.)

What struck me in this whole story was:

	- The gross stupidity of fielding, in this day and age and
		after all that has happened, a system that leaks
		valuable information so readily and pointlessly.

	- The classic response from the vendors:  "Oh, yes, that
		was in old versions of the stuff that no one
		actually uses, we fixed all that *long* ago" -
		conveniently ignoring the fact that the study
		targeted a number of cards found "in the wild",
		from multiple sources.

							-- Jerry

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