A joint statement by stiftung ear and the Federal Ministry of the Environment (BMU) has confirmed that smartcards fall within the scope of the ElektroG and therefore must be registered.
Furthermore, it was pointed out that magnetic storage cards are excluded from this ruling since these are purely passive storage devices which do not perform any operations themselves. Furthermore, they do not require electrical currents or electromagnetic fields to read or write data, since such cards are simply swiped past an external magnetic field (like when reading or writing data to and from a floppy disk or audio tape).
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