I never feel comfortable using a credit card as identification. Ever since check-in kiosks at the airport started to do that I have been uncomfortable with swiping my credit card. I know they are just looking at my name which is evidently encoded on the mag stripe, but that motion is the same motion I use at an ATM to pull money from my account. What’s to stop the airline, kiosk manufacturer, or <gasp> a hacker from grabbing my credit card number and CCV info?
Evidently there is some suspicion that that is exactly what is going on at kiosks in Toronto. One airline, WestJet, as a precautionary measure has shut off the credit card scanning function of their kiosks at 28 airports.
My advice: don’t use credit cards as ID.
Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst. He is currently consulting, speaking and writing on all manner of security topics for IT-Harvest, the IT research firm he founded to cover the security space. He was most recently chief marketing officer for Fortinet. He has served stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner, and Webroot Software.
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