I was always wondering, what is this magnetic strip on the back of my debit card, and what is it used for?

I was always wondering, what is this magnetic strip on the back of my debit card, and what is it used for?
I assume it holds some data, but I never in my life seen anyone using it.

If you've never seen someone use a magnetic strip, then you're too young to be on Sup Forums.

Are you retarded?

Literally being this autisticly new

I'm 22

Is this your idea of a joke? Pretending to be retarded? How cheap

Are you retarded?

Now, now, We all had to start somewhere.

The Mag Stripe on a credit card holds the credit card number, expiration date, and the 3 digit CVV number on the back of the card.

So basically a copy of contactless info / chip?

The chip cards are a little different, that's more of a public/private key encryption type of thing. I'm not sure of the specifics.

The Mag Stripes are less secure because they contain all the information that's printed on the card. The chip cards only contain information to authenticate a transaction.

Dunno where OP is from, but here in Belgium, you use the chip + PIN code EVERYWHERE.
Not half of the time, not 9 stores out of 10, but everywhere.

In fact I was very surprised when going on holiday to Sweden that they took my card and just swiped it through a machine to make a payment. Up until that point, I had assumed that debit cards can only make payments when entering the code.

I'm from the UK. I would say 70% is contactless and 30% is chip & pin, usually for transactions above £30

This guy has a point. America is painfully slow in adopting chip cards. I think there was some bureaucracy involved in it.

Most of Europe and probably elsewhere uses pin and chip exclusively.

So, go easy on OP. he's probably from a "better" country in this regard.

going to sage this so as not to start a flame war, but its ridiculous how you euoropeepees are still adamant in keeping your rose tinted shades on

yes, at one time europe was awesome, and i even resided there for a short time. that is not so today, if you can't see the changing dynamics of the western european nations then you are blind

same here in netherlands

UK here also, 70% seems about right for contactless. I keep finding smaller and smaller places that use it, even my local paki shop has it. And my local paki horrendously overpriced petrol station.

I haven't typed my pin in for months except when getting petrol. Contactless pay at pump when?

I'm 33 years old and I have never seen anyone "swiping" a credit card in Europe.

it probably stores the same or similar information that the contact chip or nfc chip does

i hear it's still in common use in poor countries such as the USA

When you put the card into an ATM it reads the information from the strip.

>i hear it's still in common use in poor countries such as the USA

---> keep covering your eyes friend

>if you aren't in the USA, you're in Europe
why do americans always do this?

because those are the only relevant countries

i guess NZ, aus, and canada could be considered nice too, but they certainly aren't relevant

>Europe
>Country

might as well be

Russia, China and Japan aren't relevant?

China and Japan is, but not on the Internet.
Russia only in CS:GO

You either live in some poor balkan country where they don't even have credit cards, or you haven't been outside in the past 33 years.

more like 11

I'm european and my first debit card didn't even have the magnetic strip, just the chip

>i don't have an argument so I'll have to grasp at whatever I can criticize

That's what happens when you live in a non-country

>all these amerikeks
as an old russian person we didnt have any card in ussr and in 90s no store accepted them and the bankomats were vandalized and in 2000s we already used chips

Chip & PIN has been the norm for the last 20 years.

I'm 21 and I only know it from american movies. Few times I tried to pay by swiping, but it never worked, mostly it said insert chip, and once it went trough as contactless payment.

Has anyone under age of 30 ever had a change to swipe and sign?
I only seen this shit on old american films

So then there were 13 years where people weren't doing that.

Are you fucking 12 ?

How the fuck don't you know what this thing is ?

Anyone that got into banking after year 2000 never had a chance to use it

in fact one of the earliest payment systems used chip exclusively

Checking signatures was so half assed when I worked in retail

These days if the machines arent working and you have to sign I dont see staff 4ven bothering to check it

>living in a nation that the consumer is not trusted.
>You are so untrusted,and are such a google they have to come up with methods of theft prevention

Anyone ever signed back of their card?
Not really sure why would I do it. I have been using cards for about 6 years now and never signed them.

I'm an American in a wealthy area and chip card readers were just installed in stores here about a year ago. Half the places you go still only use the swipe method. I don't know what it's like in other parts of the country but I'd expect it to be similar.

When did smart chips become widespread in Europe, anyway?

For OP, the mag strip is like a piece of audio tape glued to the card. It has all the card info written into it, so for the purposes of the shopper it's like the chip, only you swipe instead of j-j-jamming it in.

stores can refuse it if its not signed, s'all

>Now, now, We all had to start somewhere.
kys

>When did smart chips become widespread in Europe, anyway?
Introduced 1992
Mandatory (liability shift) since 2005

>When did smart chips become widespread in Europe, anyway?
Somewhere around year 2000.
For smaller transactions, they are going out of business nowadays. 1 in 5 transactions (in the UK) last month were made using contactless cards.

>This guy has a point. America is painfully slow in adopting chip cards. I think there was some bureaucracy involved in it.
That would be because the company that has a monopoly on the system made the absolute worst application of it possible.

It takes several minutes for the machine to read the chip, and it makes this god-awful error-buzz, on a success, and no sound at all on failure.

I could literally write a check in less time than it takes this card to process. Thus, I refuse to go to the express line with it.

I still have an old credit card that has no chip that I can use the fast old fashion way, but I dunno what I'm gonna do when it expires. Go back to cash, I guess.

Jesus Christ sounds like a bad horror story
Meanwhile in my country:
>Place card on top of the reader
>Success beep before I actually manage to touch it
>Transaction completed in under 0.39s

>Jesus Christ sounds like a bad horror story

He's not quite right. The chip thing was messed up when they launched it a year or two ago but now the cards pass within 10 seconds.

I don't think we even have contactless cards here. We do use smartphone payment, though.

>The chip thing was messed up when they launched it a year or two ago but now the cards pass within 10 seconds.
Well here chip payments take maybe 2-3 seconds after you type your pin in.
>We do use smartphone payment
Isn't it basically the same as contactless? I mean if a terminal accepts android or apple pay, it should take any contactless card.

It still takes more than a minute for it to process here.

>It takes several minutes for the machine to read the chip, and it makes this god-awful error-buzz, on a success, and no sound at all on failure.
This sounds horrible. It takes a second here, the only thing you need to do is enter your pin. Although you can get an express card which you activate online and can shop pin-less with it for the day.

>get new credit card
>it has one of those "chips" europoors on Sup Forums keep raving about
>go to mcdonalds
>order two mcdoubles, a mcchicken, 20 chicken nuggets, 2 large fries, and a mcflurry
>attempt to slide the chip
>"you have to insert it in the slot underneath, sir"
>the slot takes 30 seconds to find
>60 more seconds for it to "verify"
>beeps when it's done
>go deaf from beeping
>by the time I get to a table, my food is cold and a random shooter has gunned down everyone in the restaurant
>have to tip the shooter
>he only accepts credit cards
>"you have to insert it in the slot underneath, sir"
>get shot because I can't find the slot in time
>now $130k in debt from hospital bills

Such is life in mother Murika.

Contactless was invented in America and saw widespread deployement almost 20 years ago.

We just adopted it a while ago

>be me, europoor on holiday in Taiwan 3 months ago
>need to pay for hotel using card
>amount to pay too high for contactless payment, attempt to recall what my pin is
>he takes out terminal
>I get all sweaty because I can't remember my pin
>"please swipe your card sir"
>'what'
>"swipe here"
>oh shit, I remember seeing it in old American films, I can do it
>gentle swipe the card like it's 1995 again
>"Thank you sir, now please sign here"
>'what?'
>I will need your signature to confirm the transaction
>'why?'

>here in Belgium, you use the chip + PIN code EVERYWHERE.

Unless you don't have a fucking Maestro card like you faggots, and have to fork out cash. god it's like you fap to those cards. in NL it's the same shit
too bad albert heijn had me locked for a customer...

tbvh Im pretty biased here because I am from Spain and here you can use whatever the fuck you want. hell, you can even use american express. gotta pander to those tourist shekels I suppose!

They have them in Starbucks in the UK so I tried it once
It didnt work

Hahaha yeah who was in charge of putting in that fucking sound

> (OP)
>i hear it's still in common use in poor countries such as the USA

I live in México and we use the chip everywhere

The signature doesn't do anything but legally affirm the cardholder made the purchase. At least, that's how it functions in America.

USA is a single large country because its too young to have a complex history and culture diversity, with multiple languages, traditions and all.
Europe have been moving for more than 4000 years and had a lot of war.

USA is a shit country that have a lot of service locked down by stupid monopoly.

Look at the credit card. Almost every developed country, from Mexico to Russia, use chip nowadays because its safer, while Ameritards are using old unsecured swiping bullshit.

Look at the internet. Even poor country from eastern Europe have a 4 times faster bandwidth for 3 times cheaper than in the USA, without the stupid data caps or throttling things.

It has nothing to do with any monopoly. It has to do with the fact that the US had credit cards far earlier than many countries (as early as the sixties), and for decades had a lower fraud rate and had far greater online processing capabilities (which meant we didn't need EMV).

Eventually with EMV adoption around the world and proliferation of the internet/personal computers, mass harvesting the track data from magswipes and selling them online became a profitable business, and it started to cost banks that issued credit cards more to pay for the fraudulent charges than it would be to upgrade all the shit in the backend to support chips.

So Visa, Mastercard, Amex, Discover made a rule: Most stores (exceptions: Gas pumps, ATMs) have to support chip by October 2015. If both sides support chip and there's a fraud claim, the bank pays. If only the retailer supports chip (but not the issuer), then the bank pays. If the issuing bank supports chip but the retailer doesn't, the retailer now has to bear the cost of fraud.

Merchants in the US who choose not to upgrade to EMV are basically weighing their risk of fraud vs. the cost to upgrade their payment terminals and point of sale software to support chip (and the effort to get the upgrades rolled out). As more and more merchants upgrade to chip, those who don't will be the "soft targets" for card cloning fraud, which will eventually drive everyone else to upgrade.

Except only one company is authorized to make the machine in question, thus monopoly - and they make the most shit machine possible. Dial-up credit cards were faster than this buzzing POS.

We used to have a bunch of wave-pay RDIF chip readers around here, dunno why they took em all out - suspect there's some crooked and/or stupid political debacle going on with that as well.

At least some stores have refused to upgrade though.

No one company is authorized to make EMV (chip) capable machines. Verifone makes eighty percent of them, but Ingenico and others make terminals capable of reading chip cards.

>At least some stores have refused to upgrade though.
You don't have to upgrade.

Here's the kicker: From now on, if that card has fraudulent payments, that merchant has to reimburse the charges, NOT the credit card company.