Glossary
NFC
Near Field Communication, a radio standard that lets two devices exchange a small amount of data when they are a few centimetres apart. On a business card it holds one thing: a web address. The card carries no battery and stores no personal data.
NFC runs at 13.56 MHz on top of ISO/IEC 14443 and ISO/IEC 18092, the same family of standards behind contactless payment cards and building badges. Useful range is about four centimetres, which is why a tap is a deliberate gesture rather than something that happens as you walk past.
A tag in a business card is passive. It has no battery and no clock. The reader's field powers the chip for the fraction of a second it takes to read it, which is why a card still works years later and has nothing to charge.
What the chip actually holds
One NDEF record containing a URI, and nothing else. A LeadShake address is roughly forty characters, so even the smallest chip has room to spare. Your name, your job title and your photograph are not on the card: they live on the page the address points to, which is what lets you change them without reprinting anything.
That distinction matters for a question people ask often. A tag cannot leak your contacts, because your contacts were never on it.
Reading a tag without installing anything
On iPhone, background tag reading has been built into iOS since version 14 on the iPhone 7 and later. The screen has to be on, and the antenna sits along the top edge, behind the camera. On Android the antenna is usually in the middle of the back, and NFC has to be enabled in the settings.
Phones that cannot tap still reach the same page through a QR fallback. The chip family used in cards and stickers is covered under NTAG.
Questions
No. The tag is passive: it draws the power it needs from the reader's field during the tap itself. There is no battery inside and nothing to recharge, which is why a card keeps working for years.
Related terms
- NTAG
- A family of NFC chips, NTAG213 to NTAG216, found in most cards and stickers. They differ in memory size, from roughly 144 to 888 bytes. Since a card only stores a web address, the smallest is enough.
- QR fallback
- A QR code shown alongside an NFC card so phones that cannot tap, or have NFC switched off, reach the same page with their camera. Any card that relies on NFC alone loses those visitors.
- vCard
- The standard file format for a contact, with the extension .vcf. Opening one offers to add the person to the phone’s address book. LeadShake serves a vCard 3.0, the version both iOS and Android import without complaint.