The IT Nerd

I recently renewed my Canadian passport. The good news that they had a 10 year renewal option which gives me one less thing to think about. At least for the next decade. The bad news is that is came with an RFID chip in it. Seeing as there have been cases where these types of passports have been easily cloned from a distance, I figured that I shouldn’t take any chances. Thus I went to ThinkGeek and got myself an RFID Blocking Passport Billfold. It is made of leather, but it has a lining that keeps people from using RFID scanners to steal your personal info. Besides having a section with clear plastic to hold your passport, it has for slots for other ID such as a drivers license or insurance card, as well as a pocket for money. It fits nicely into any of my suit jacket pockets and I don’t really notice it. Plus it’s easy to remove anything that I need to use. Most importantly, it looks and feels like a quality product. But the real question is does it prevent your RFID enabled passport from being read? The answer is yes. I put my passport in it and I used a RFID reader to try and read it. It was unable to, thus this works as advertised.

These days, you don’t have to be Edward Snowden to worry about your personal info being stolen. This should be a concern for everyone as RFID is a pervasive technology. Thus in my mind, if you take your privacy seriously, you should take a look at ThinkGeek’s RFID Blocking Passport Billfold. It works and at $17.99 USD, it’s a great deal.

This entry was posted on March 25, 2014 at 8:50 am and is filed under Products with tags ThinkGeek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.