How can you verify a piece of information, such as a person’s identity or their date of birth or their employment status? Many industries and sectors in the United States today make good use of ID readers, ballot scanners, barcode readers, and a whole lot more. Even handheld ID scanners for bars can be put to good use, and handheld ID scanners for bars can help prevent illegal underage drinking. But it’s not just handheld ID scanners for bars; image scanner or chip reader tech can also work for law enforcement purposes, or to keep intruders out of a workplace. Not to mention how retailers routine work with customers who have debit and credit cards on them for their payment method. What is there to know about handheld ID scanners for bars, full page scanners, and the like?
Money
A major arena for scanner tech is financial transactions. Strictly speaking, once a customer brings their desired items to the checkout, they will incur a debt once the bar codes on those items are read with a laser scanner. But that’s just the first step of scanner work. Now, the customer must pay that debt, and if they don’t do so with cash, they are probably going to present a debit card of a credit card. Such cards may have bar codes, magnetic strips, or even an advanced electronic chip in them. Both handheld and counter-based scanners can read information from those cards, and the proper funds will be transferred from one place to another. In the case of credit cards, the money goes from the credit card to the retailer’s own account, and for debit cards, the money will come from whatever bank account the customer has linked to their card. Chip readers in those cards are a recent innovation to help prevent security issues from coming up. Such cards are often used since cash is bulky, and the transactions by card are all logged online. For any reason, a person can review the log of all their credit or debit card uses, such as tracking their finances or pinpointing when someone stole their card and started using it.
Other Uses for Scanners
Scanners are a staple for handling financial transactions, but that is not the only use for scanner tech. Police officers often make use of handheld scanners to read the driver’s license or other ID of someone they just pulled over, and bring up all relevant data of that person. Not to mention how some establishments use scanners, such as handheld ID scanners for bars, where certain products or services are age-restricted. Scanners can check a card’s information and verify the holder’s personal status.
Workplaces sometimes make use of scanners, too, such as warehouses or factories. All employees and other authorized personnel will have their own photo ID cards, and they can scan these when arriving at work to verify their identification. This prevents any unauthorized individuals from getting into the premises or attempting to pass themselves off as an employee. Military bases may do something similar, where security is typically quite strict. In situations like these, a photo ID carrier may also present that ID to a human guard, who will compare the face of the holder to the photo’s contents.
Scanners are useful for voting, too. The United States has a very low incident rate of voter fraud, and this is due to the strict use of ID rules as well as electronic ballot scanners. A voter may arrive and have their ID scanned by human personnel, and voter may then either use an electronic touch screen to register votes or fill out a paper form with pencils or pens. A paper ballot is then fed into a digital ballot scanner, which will read the contents and log them. In this way, a voting site can efficiently and accurately collect hundreds or even thousands of votes.
Finally, high quality image scanners can be used to scan a paper document and record its information in digital form, a common practice among office buildings today. When too many papers build up, professionals can be hired to scan all those papers, upload them as digital files, then destroy the paper copies. This may be done routinely in many cases.