Why RFID marketers should do more testing

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an interesting and quirky middle column article about why some people microwave their credit cards. The real issue: there is a community of consumers who are very concerned about their privacy, and they don't want thieves to be able to steal their credit card numbers by radio snooping.

When Brenden Walker got his new MasterCard PayPass ATM card in the mail last month, he headed to the gas station to try it out.

To test the card's "Tap N Go" convenience, he passed it in front of the scanner, which activated with a beep and displayed the word "authorizing..." on its LCD screen.

That was quite enough for Mr. Walker. Without completing the transaction, he put the card down on the pavement and took a hammer to it.

....

In any event, he wants no part of it. Hammering the card destroyed the chip. "I tried it again and...nothing," he says. "I might as well have been holding up a salami sandwich."

Lest we think Mr. Walker is just a kook, financial services companies also thought people who worried about identity theft were just kooks about ten years ago. Now even the FBI is concerned about identity theft.

The sad part about this article is that if the card issuers had tested the technology with real consumers, they would have uncovered this concern and been able to deal with it. A radio-proof envelope for these RFID credit cards would cost them only about a dollar, yet would assuage these consumer concerns and provide significant marketing differentiation for the issuing company. But instead of a marketing coup, the Wall Street Journal article is noting just how short-sighted the RFID card issuers are, and how consumers are having to take matters into their own hands to deal with their shortcomings.

The card Ms. Lum carries came without any information about security safeguards, she says, so she decided to take no chances. "It's maybe a little bit of a paranoia thing, but hey, it's my credit rating," she says.

Eric Caraszi, a 26-year-old computer programmer in Albany, N.Y., recently bought an RFID-proof wallet after having a conversation with a co-worker about different ways criminals might be able to exploit RFID-chip cards -- from sneaky scans on crowded elevators to high-powered scanners on the roadside that could mine passing traffic.

"For every smart person trying to make a lock, there is going to be an equally smart person trying to unlock that lock," he notes.

Would that there were equally as many smart people in RFID card marketing.

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