IDG Contributor Network: How magnetic ID cards are becoming indestructable

One of the problems with traditional magnetic storage has always been that, because it's written with magnetic fields, it can be wiped by those fields too.

That makes for a pretty unstable medium—though convenient and more efficient than many.

Magnetic storage is used in ID and credit cards too, but the environments that the cards encounter are brutal on the media.

So is space travel, and indeed the residential living rooms with magnet-containing home theatre speakers, for example. Remember the mysteriously deteriorating cassette tape?

Yet magnetic media has its favorable qualities—it's more secure than Radio Frequency (RF) chips, for example.

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