How can businesses and retailers, workplaces, police officers, and voting sites keep careful track of information such as a person’s identity or financial transactions? Most often, scanners such as smart credit card readers, full page scanners, ballot scanners, and barcode readers are up to the job. Much of today’s business work is based on scanning information quickly and accurately, and that may often take place in the office or retailers. When it comes to smart credit card readers, information and money can be transferred with a great deal of privacy and security, to help reduce rates of identity theft or other crime.

Finances

Although cash is certainly still used for many purchases, plastic debit cards and credit cards are a staple for purchasing items and services of all sorts. A debit card will be linked to the holder’s bank account and use their own money, while a credit card is based on borrowed money from the credit card company. Either way, the customer will present this card, and the retailer will scan its magnetic strip to confirm the fund transfer electronically. Elsewhere, the funds are moved as needed and this can take only a split second for convenience. What is more, this means that the holder does not have to carry around a lot of paper bills and coins, and their bank or credit card company should keep a log of all financial transactions. In this way, the card holder can look up all purchases they made, and that’s useful for tracking down when the card might have been stolen. Similarly, smart credit card readers will scan the chip inside a debit or credit card and transfer funds that way. the chip and smart credit card reader will generate a random code with each transfer, and that can make identity theft very difficult for an outside party to attempt.

Other Scanners

Retailers make heavy use of scanner technology, from reading credit cards to using lasers to scan the bar codes on items. But that’s not all. At many workplaces, employees may carry a plastic photo ID card, and that card may also come with a bar code on it. With this, an employee may present their ID to a scanner, and prove their identity and authorization to enter the workplace. The photo ID is for the benefit of human security guards, who may look at these cards to authenticate the holder. All of this can go a long way toward preventing intruders from getting into the workplace.

A voting site is likely to have a ballot scanner on hand, and this large machine has a slot where voters may insert a paper ballot. Once voters arrive, they may have their IDs checked with scanners by human staff, and those voters may then either vote with touch screens or mark paper ballot with a pencil. The ballot reader can accurately scan the contents of all paper ballots placed inside, and that allows a voting site to register a huge number of votes per day. That, combined with ID checking, may be why the United States has very low incident rates of voter fraud.

Police officers and state troopers may also make use of ID scanner tech, most often using handheld ID readers that they may keep in their cruiser. A law enforcement official may use this on the driver’s license of any person they pull over, to verify that person’s ID and get other information. An officer may quickly pull up data on that person’s criminal record and other vital statistics.

Offices may hire scanner companies to help them manage all their paperwork. Today’s businesses make good use of paper documents, but over time, a lot will build up, and that poses some problems. So, the company may hire professionals who will use full page scanners to scan and upload the contents of thousands of papers. All of that data can be uploaded into the company’s data server and Cloud data storage. Once that is done, it is common practice to shred those paper documents to protect their sensitive contents. The paper remains may then be discarded or recycled, clearing up room in the office.