It took the hacking of 70 million Target credit cards during the 2013 holiday season to spur Congress into abandoning the highly unsecure magnetic-stripe cards used by most Americans and setting a deadline for the new (to the U.S., anyway) smart card technology. While Americans are just starting to learn what a smart card is, it’s been (successfully) used in other markets for more than 20 years, making the U.S. the only major market on the planet still using the swipe and sign technology.
Source: ComputerScienceDegreeHub.com.