Card key is more than door opener

REGARDING “Hotel Cards: Holding ID Key?” Travel Insider, May 7: I am glad to know card keys don’t open portals to my identity but was surprised that your article did not mention another important function of card keys in China.

In my travels from Tianjin on China’s east coast to its western extreme, I found room entry cards also connected electricity to the room. As I entered the room, there was a slot on the wall next to the door where you had to place the key if you wanted lights or anything else that needed power to function.

The importance of the key was impressed on me when the card key I had placed in the slot was taken by my traveling companion when she went out one night. I had to grope my way in the dark.

ANNE MEGOWAN

Los Angeles

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YOUR article was not as reassuring to me as you might have hoped. To me, if the card yields “only indecipherable strings of numbers and letters,” then all that means is that the data are encrypted, not that the data can’t be read. If the data are encrypted, then someone knows how to read it, and you don’t know what they will learn.

It would have been far more reassuring if you had read the card and understood what you read, and could see that it didn’t contain sensitive information.

BRUCE WALKER

San Pedro