Kinda. Have you tried using an NFC reader with your phone’s tap to pay? You didn’t get the actual card data. It’s all tokenized now. If I remember the details correctly, the merchant sends a token that they partly generate and add the token data the get from your card and they send that to the payment processor, and it’s only really usable at that point in time. So if I was wandering around with a high powered NFC antenna I’d need to be running a merchant terminal ready to charge them. I can’t harvest the data to sell later or anything like that. So the risk is pretty heavily mitigated.
That being said, I still use a wallet with NFC and RFID blocking
I’ve worked in IT support/Security for too long to have any of my cards just a short nfc tap away from being used/stolen from.
Don’t you need to unlock the phone to activate the NFC chip though?
Yes, but cards can just be read
Kinda. Have you tried using an NFC reader with your phone’s tap to pay? You didn’t get the actual card data. It’s all tokenized now. If I remember the details correctly, the merchant sends a token that they partly generate and add the token data the get from your card and they send that to the payment processor, and it’s only really usable at that point in time. So if I was wandering around with a high powered NFC antenna I’d need to be running a merchant terminal ready to charge them. I can’t harvest the data to sell later or anything like that. So the risk is pretty heavily mitigated.
That being said, I still use a wallet with NFC and RFID blocking
Hmmm, that is good to know! I have an RFID blocking wallet too just in case
Then you’re well aware that it doesn’t work while the card is in a typical wallet.