A magnetic stripe card is a card (e.g., a credit card) that contains a stripe of magnetically-encoded data. These cards are paired with readers and writers, and are used in a wide variety of applications for storing information.

Usage

Most identification, credit, automated teller machine, and membership cards have a thin magnetic stripe across one side of the card. By "swiping" the card through or inserting the card into a reader, a computer can read the data on the stripe. Magnetic stripes make card usage much less prone to error because the data are not entered manually. The data cannot be read without a correctly programmed machine, and the cards must be created with special equipment, both of which make cards hard to falsify. The stripes can also contain encrypted information and information not printed on the card which can only be created...