Can Smart Cards Offer Identity Theft Protection?

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Many people worry that Smart Cards will not offer enough security to prevent thieves from taking all of the information that they need to steal someone’s identity. This concern makes a lot of sense in some ways. After all, if you have all of your information in one place, it could be easy for a thief to steal it and do whatever he wants.

Isn’t having everything in the same location a bad idea?

That depends on whether individuals choose to use security software that will prevent other people from accessing their information. For instance, consumers could choose to download software that only certain individuals can use. If security software forces each person accessing the Smart Card to answer extremely private questions, then thieves would have a much harder time stealing information.

This is similar to what bank ATMs do. When you insert your bank card into an ATM, the machine asks you for a PIN that identifies you as the right person for the account. Without the correct PIN, you have no way to access the information.

Is it possible for thieves to get around this and similar protections? It could be possible. That’s one of the reasons that technology keeps moving forward at such a fast clip. Shortly after a company develops new security protection, hackers start tearing it apart to find ways that they can access information without the proper identification.

So far, security specialists have been able to stay a step ahead of most hackers. There are a few extremely talented individuals who can perform amazing feats with computers. Those individuals, however, are not interested in stealing your identity. They work on much bigger projects. As long as common people can protect themselves from common criminals, they are as safe as they could ever hope to be. The Smart Card takes this protection to a new level.

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Choosing the Best Financial Options

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During this time of economic crisis, many investors like yourself are looking for high yield, low risk investments. This is easier said than done. Many high yield investments are risky, very risky. When your cash flow and risk tolerance investing are low, then high yield investments do not seem as promising. But low risk investments seem to take forever to mature and yield substantial benefits. So, what is a cautious investor like yourself to do? Perhaps, you should consider investing in municipal bonds.  With a municipal bond, you can help your community and establish a solid financial situation for you and your family.

When considering a municipal bond, you should consider how much the municipal bond yields annually and quarterly. According to the tax laws, any city, town must disclose all financial risks before your invest. This means you should have a good idea before investing how much return your municipal bond yields. This also means you can assess your comfort level when it comes to risk on your municipal loans as well. When discussing this investment with your financial advisor, you should always be up front and honest about how much risk you are comfortable taking on. Even if your municipal bond yields well each year, the risk involved may be more than what you are comfortable with during this economic crisis. But if you do not disclose your misgivings, your financial advisor will not be able to help you plan correctly.

Your muni bond yields well this year, you should also consider that it may not do as well next year. Being realistic with your expectations for a municipal bond yield will help. You will protect yourself from being disappointed due to unrealistic goals and expectations for your municipal bond yields.

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Introduction to the Smart Card

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Smart cards resemble credit cards both in terms of their size and their shape, however when it comes to the inside of the smart card, everything is different. Normal credit cards are simply made out of plastic, but smart cards on the other hand have something inside of them. Inside of a regular smart card you are most likely to find an embedded microprocessor that can be found underneath a gold contact pad which is located on one of the two sides of the card. You can think of this microprocessor as being a replacement for the typical magnetic stripe that you would find on a traditional debit card or a credit card.

In Europe, smart cards are a lot more popular than they are in the United States. In European countries, both the banking industry and the health insurance industry rely on the use of smart cards on an extensive basis. For example, in Germany you will find that every single citizen has their own smart card for the purpose of health insurance. Even though, like top affiliate programs, smart cards have been around for many years, they are just beginning to really take off in the United States.

Technology revolving around the magnetic stripe still remains in pretty wide use around the United States, but the information that is found in these magnetic stripes can be read, written to, deleted or altered fairly easily using equipment that can be purchased rather freely. What this means is that while the magnetic stripe appears to be useful, it is not really a safe place where you will want to store sensitive information. In order to protect consumers, companies in the United States are beginning to invest in online computer networks that are mainframe-based in order to process and verify, but this infrastructure is not developed in Europe which is why smart cards are in such wide use.

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Circles

Bend your mind around this: Information shared using sign and verbal language backed up with petroglyphs. Information stored on stone and clay taking form in symbols such as Ogam and Egyptian Coptic. Information stored and shared on paper bound in volumes filling countless halls. Information stored on millions of miles of magnetic tape.

Information stored utilizing mathematics that becomes so complex that it increases the abilities to store the information. It’s circular and grows exponentially. Information stored on magnetic disks, which moves to information stored optically.

Every form of human experience, communication and art form stored indefinitely. Information stored on smart cards, including GPS locations, a free ringtone, photographs of families and lovers, and technical information used to operate every kind of invention.

If you are old enough to remember when the Teac reel-to-reel tape recorder was the cutting edge technology in the early seventies, you may also remember the cover of a Moody Blues album called To Our Children’s, Children’s, Children. The artwork depicts the same metaphor as the words above, but ends that metaphor with war that leads to petroglyphs again. The circle.

Archeologists have unearthed a good deal of information about advanced races before us. Some of the findings include small batteries. Where did that humanity go and what technology have we lost? Since 1994, when the final meanings were uncovered in ancient Mayan texts, we also discovered that the ancients were savvy enough to leave their most precious knowledge in the form of mathematics built into the dimensions of the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids. It reminds us of the Moody Blues Album cover. They saw the writing on the wall, so to speak.

Consider the possibilities that may unfold if we allow ourselves the opportunity to keep working from the smart card onward. Family photos, mathematics, and music advance to . . . what next? How big can the circle get?

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