As the summer months are approaching, so are long-awaited summer vacations. I recently traveled to Germany, and in my carry-on bag, I had at least five different methods of payment and identification with Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags embedded in them. My U.S. passport, several credit cards and a few other devices in my purse all have RFID tags in them. There have been a number of articles and discussions on social media and in the popular press about the safety of the information stored on those RFID chips in the past several years, and there are many misconceptions about how RFID tags work, how much information someone can gain from reading them and just who can read the information on those tags.

Before I talk about just how safe your purse or wallet is with all that technology buried inside it, let me first tell you how RFID technology works.

Consider the RFID chip that you see on your credit card. This chip is used when you swipe your card past one of those flat readers at the grocery store instead of swiping it through the slot on the old-style card readers that read the magnetic strip. When your chip is placed close to the reader, a signal is sent from the reader to your credit card. This signal has enough energy to charge a type of battery (a capacitor) inside the chip, which allows your chip to begin transmitting. Without first receiving this charge, your RFID chip can’t do anything. Once the chip is fully charged, the RFID chip uses the signal as a something called a carrier wave, which essentially lets the RFID reader know that the signal coming back to it came from the chip it just charged.

Because of these chips, it might be a good idea to use an RFID-protected purse or wallet when you travel (or maybe all the time). Using radio signals to transfer information, track the location of the transmission and measure the movement of the device transmitting information is a well-studied area of science. What is new is that almost everyone has a transmitter with personal information, which will automatically be transmitted if the transmitter receives a charge. While it is currently unlikely that a nefarious character will have the knowledge and the equipment to create devices to take advantage of these little transceivers in your wallet, the technology does exist and is inexpensive. Some of the current research for utilizing RFID tags for marketing purposes include tracking the position of a particular RFID tag, maximum reading distance (6 feet in perfect conditions, almost always much less) and information extraction (thankfully, the information is often encrypted).

Everyone in the financial, marketing, ID and other industries that utilize RFID tags is aware of the security issues involved, and RFID-safe wallets and purses are becoming more commonly available. So when you’re traveling this summer, stop by a local Worcester business that sells travel supplies and pickup an RFID-resistant bag, wallet or purse to add your own layer of protection.

By R.J. Linton