While the focus on my blog is usually health related, this week’s information is related to your financial health. I met with a group of friends for dinner earlier this week and one of them is planning a 2 week trip abroad and wanted to ensure her finanical safety on the trip.
She shared stories from past trips of seeing and/or hearing friends being pickpocketed and not knowing it had happened to them. This is not something I normally worry about on a daily basis, but is definitely something many people think about when traveling. She then shared something interesting about a new feature on some credit cards that can be easily accessed THROUGH your purse or clothing. It is a new feature called “blink”.
When she described it, all of us opened up our wallets to see if any of the credit cards had this new feature. Unknown to all of us, at least one of all of our cards had this blink technology logo. I had never heard of such a concept before, so when I got home I decided to google it and learn more about it. Here is an article from FORBES magazine with some facts around the new technology. While it might have some new cool features, this article also shows how easy it is for a pickpocketor to steal information from your card, when your card is NOT even out in the open. I personally would rather be safe than sorry when it comes to a situation like this. My friend said she called her credit card company and asked them to resend her a card without the blink. Any they did.
If anyone has had any experience with this new blink technology (either good or bad), I’d love to hear some other thoughts. In case you haven’t heard of blink, attached is the FORBES article. Hacker’s Demo Shows How Easily Credit Cards Can Be Read Through Clothes And Wallets