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weee here it goes...
an ISO 3554 magnetic stripe card has three data tracks...the first one is 210 BPI at 7bits per character with parity and holds 79 alpha-numeric characters... the second one is 75 BPI at 5bits per character including parity and can hold 40 digits... the last track is at 210 BPI with 5bits per character including parity nd can hold 107 digits... of these three tracks, the top two are read-only while the last one is read/write; so in general most banks etc only use the first two tracks... due to this some cards even leave off the third track since it's intended purpose was off-line ATM authorization, but due to security risks etc they dropped that idea... if the ATM isn't connected then it won't let you withdraw money...
back to the question...the format of the first track in a mag-stripe card depends on the usage... for example the format of an ATM card is completely different then a starbucks card or a student id etc... the first tracks data usually contains cardholder information... a common ATM header layout contains:
- Account Number
- Country Code
- Name
- Expiration date
- Balance
these are all optional pieces of information... and this is obviously not the only data on there but they aren't anything interesting (e.g. start/end sentinels etc)...
so is it possible that your card holds alot of info about you? yes... same holds true for other card formats... a drivers licence holds the same information as on the card, who knows what a starbucks card holds... perhaps your last 10 orders ;)
oh yeah, track 2 isn;t as interesting, it generally holds the account number and expiration date... no personal info is stored there since it's mostly a numeric only formatted stripe...
hope this answers your question
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