Is this the end of magnetic tape?

As he put his key card into his hotel room door reader and tried to open the handle – to no avail – he realized what he had done.

For years, Stephen Murdoch, a security researcher at University College London, has been careful not to keep tickets or cards with magnetic stripes in his pocket next to his smartphone. That’s because the magnets in smartphones are sometimes strong enough to erase the data on the magnetic stripes.

But magnetic stripe hotel cards are becoming rare these days, increasingly replaced by contactless cards that have radio frequency identification (RFID) chips embedded in them.

Consequently, Professor Murdoch forgot to take the necessary precautions during a visit to the hotel in January this year, and concluded that he wiped his room key – after using it only once.

“I should have known better, this is the kind of thing I know,” he says. Back at the front desk, he realized he wasn’t alone.

“There was a line of people with the exact same problem I had,” he recalls.

Magnetic strip Invented by an IBM engineer In the 1960s – His wife played an active role in this process as it was she who suggested melting a strip of magnetic tape onto a card using a clothes iron.

Since then, magnetic strips have been used on bank cards, railway tickets, identity cards, and even cards containing medical information, to set up hospital machines.

But this dark brown strip of plastic, usually made of contaminated heavy metals, may not last much longer.

From this year onwards, for example, MasterCard will not ask banks Place a magnetic strip on debit and credit cards.

For tickets, new technologies including printable barcodes and reusable contactless cards are more environmentally friendly and more convenient.

You also can’t erase it by accidentally placing it near your iPhone.

There are two types of magnetic strips, called HiCo and LoCo. The latter are cheaper, less durable and more susceptible to damage from magnets, says Lee Minter, president of global operations at Nagels, which makes magnetic strip tickets and other products. The company recently investigated reports from a customer who said multiple magnetic strip tickets he had purchased had gone bad.

Mr. Minter says he can’t be 100 percent sure, but he and his colleagues believe the problem was caused by part of a circular magnet inside the customer’s iPhone.

“It matched the area that was scanned perfectly,” he says.

In response, Apple said: “Smartphones and other items contain magnets or components that may be at risk of demagnetizing low-coercive-force cards. To prevent this from happening, users should keep these cards stored separately.”

Although such disruptions remain relatively rare, Minter says the popularity of magnetic strips is waning anyway. He estimates that less than a fifth of the five billion tickets Nagles prints each year are equipped with magnetic strips.

Minter is keen to stress the potential of thermally printed paper tickets, such as receipts, which are now being used in trials at several railway stations across the UK. These tickets come with a QR code that can be used on ticket barrier scanners. There is a separate code on the back of the tickets to prevent people from counterfeiting the tickets.

Stuart Taylor, head of commercial development at Northern, the train operator, says 70% of his company’s customers now buy digital tickets, and that Northern could scrap the familiar orange-edged, magnetic-stripe versions in just five years.

“There is a clear environmental benefit,” Mr Taylor says. “I think times have changed.”

Northern is now trialling thermally printed paper tickets made by Nagels as an alternative. Mr Taylor says there have been some issues with printer jams and tickets getting stuck in ticket machines, but these have largely been addressed.

He stressed that there are no plans to withdraw paper tickets, nor to reduce the number of employees involved in selling tickets.

Are there any benefits to keeping magnetic stripe cards or tokens?

“No,” says Sue Walnut, product manager for intelligent transportation systems at Fix Technology, bluntly.

She claims that there are now many different ways to validate a train ticket – for example, QR codes displayed on phone screens, tickets printed at home, and contactless prepaid cards – making the need to keep magnetic strip technology less than ever.

But magnetic-stripe tickets and entry cards fit easily into credit-card holders in wallets and bags. The new paper tickets being tested by Northern and other rail companies are bulkier. “They’re a bit unwieldy and annoying,” says Ms. Walnut.

Magnetic stripe has been around for so long partly because it is relatively cheap, and the specifications for readers were set decades ago, says Stephen Cranfield of Barnes International, which makes magnetic stripe testing equipment.

“If you took your card today and used it in a magnetic stripe reader from 1970, it would still be able to read it,” he says.

His company has worked on a variety of systems — including one designed to allow kidney failure patients to use a magnetic stripe card to set up their dialysis machine.

Although the magnetic stripes are most common in dark brown or black, they can come in a whole range of colours. “They’re very common in China, actually – gold stripes,” explains Mr Cranfield.

But now that US banks are finally switching to chip-and-PIN cards, it’s clear that the market for magnetic stripes is dwindling.

Professor Murdoch says that while magnetic stripe technology is well established, it is “inevitable” that it will gradually disappear. One downside, he points out, is that cases of magnetic stripe failure and fraud are now well known. Newer technologies, while theoretically safer, may be more sophisticated – and therefore more vulnerable to exploitation by criminals using new methods.

Sometimes members of the public contact Professor Murdoch when they have difficulty proving that they have been defrauded by their banks.

“If the transaction was done using magnetic stripe, it’s very easy to say someone copied it,” says Professor Murdoch, pointing out the paradox. “But if the transaction is one of the more secure methods – it’s much harder.”