As we all know, those days are gone and buried. Today’s purchases can be paid for in a myriad of ways, including credit and debit cards used online, gift cards and bitcoin, to name a few. Transactions can also be paid for on the fly, such as at pop-up shops using mobile payment systems such as Square or Paypal Here. Accompanying the increasing ease of using credit and debit cards is the dizzying need for protection from thieves eager to hack into our accounts to use our money. Even hamburger giant Wendy's just reported many of their restaurants had their accounts hacked into. If a multi-national like Wendy’s can’t protect against cyber-thieves, what can Mom and Pop stores do about it?

The latest innovation of the credit card industry is credit cards featuring chip and PIN technology. With those, the credit card data is stored on a tiny computer chip embedded in the card versus the magnetic strip that was the universal standard. Today’s chip and PIN technology got its start in France in 1984, when French banks began testing chip-based cards. In 1996, the world’s leading credit card companies collaborated to create a new, more secure standard based on the French technology. That led to the eventual introduction of today’s chip and PIN cards in the United States, also known as EMV cards, an acronym standing for Europay. MasterCard and VISA joined in, and the three entities developed the first international technological standards for chip and PIN cards.

One of the reasons chip and PIN cards offer more security than cards with magnetic strips is that the chip stores card data. The chip and PIN cards uses cryptography to protect secure data when communicating with a card reader. In stores, the customer inserts their credit card into a slot on a card reader. Depending on the type of terminal, the purchaser either enters a PIN or signs a printed receipt. One of the benefits of a retailer offering a card reader is that it does not have to be connected to a phone or internet line to process the transaction. However, terminals finalizing magnetic strip cards had to communicate with the credit card company before authorizing the charge.

While neither magnetic nor chip and PIN cards offer additional protection against fraudulent online purchases, chip and PIN cards are designed to offer extra safety against unauthorized credit card purchases in-store. That is, when the customer is required to enter their secret PIN into the card reader. Unfortunately, there is no requirement that consumers set up their credit card accounts to work only when a PIN is entered into a card reader, thereby negating the usefulness of the increased protection.

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Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer who tweets as @girlwithapen.