The long life and imminent death of the mag-stripe card

The visual story of data storage: From storage properties to user interfaces

“…Note that there exists no device with a write-only mutability. We refer to the binary state of read and write (using the letter x) versus the read-only state [18] , [24] , [25] , [26] , [27] , [28] , [29] , [30] , [31] , [32] , [33] , [34] , [35] , [36] , [37] , [38] , [39] , [40] , [41] , [42] , [43] , [44] , [45] , [46] , [47] , [48] , [49] , [50] , [51] , [52] , [53] , [54] , [55] , [56] , [57] , [58] , [59] , [60] , [61] , [62] , [63] , [64] , [65] , [66] , [67] , [68] , [69] , [70] , [71] , [72] , [73] , [74] , [75] , [76] .

Fig.

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Plastic surveillance: Payment cards and the history of transactional data, 1888 to present

“…During the 1980s, these barriers were removed by magnetic-stripe technology and advances in POS systems. Cards equipped with "mag" stripes were encoded with account data (Svigals, 2012), and POS systems recorded item-by-item purchases by scanning product barcodes. When used together, they automatically linked people to the things they paid for.…”