For a long time (at least three years), there’s been discussion how RFID’s either inhibit or enable the theft of your identity. The basic premise of this argument is that when you have a credit card that can transfer data through radio waves (thus enabling a contact-less transaction) that anyone who is in possession of a machine that can read RFID essentially has free access to your card’s data. This is, for all intents and purposes, true–it’s a tried and true practice known as “skimming”. It’s a pretty scary concept–that identity thieves can simply walk around in crowded public places latching onto the radio frequency of peoples’ RFID cards and storing them for use later. Surprisingly, though, this rarely happens. Why? Because there are no portable RFID scanners–although there are certainly unscrupulous people out there with the ability to do it, for the most part common thieves simply aren’t willing to spend a couple grand to purchase a machine that can read these cards and then wheel it around through your local Whole Foods to snag your credit card data.

It’s been recommended on some websites to do ridiculous things like “take a hammer to your passport”, “zap your credit card” in the microwave, or “drill a hole” through the magnetic bar strips. Pretty ridiculous. For just $9/m (using your Lifelock promotion code) you can get Lifelock rather than going through these petty, useless practices but whatever. Preying on the paranoia of people is a pretty common practice and telling them to nuke their credit card in the microwave instills a false sense of panic that there are things they can’t see that are making them more vulnerable to identity theft. There are countless, valid threats out there but sleep easy friends, the RFID is not enabling malicious thieves to virtually steal your identity. There’s a much greater chance it’s get taken in the real world (see pickpocketing) or virtually by a virus or an insecure purchase.

If you’re still concerned about RFID and identity theft read this article on CNET. Although it’s a little scare-tactic-y it’s got a lot of solid information about how RFID works and how your personal data is stored and what credit companies are doing to help safeguard it.

Tags: lifelock, rfid, skimming

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 18th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under Individuals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.