Is that why all new wallets boast “RFID” protection? I never really made sense of that…
To me, NameDrop just seems like a new Apple variant on what we used to do with Palm Pilots and other devices: Proximity info sharing. From Apple’s perspective, this is intended to reduce a common pain point of social contact between two people that want to share each other’s contact info.
How does this event usually play out? From what I have observed, it often entails one person calling the other’s phone and then each person hand-enters the other’s info, or manually push their contact cards via text. NameDrop is an attempt to reduce the steps and tedium of this process.
Apple could have perhaps explained things a little more (something they have become increasingly deficient at, sadly), but that may not have prevented the social/news media going off into left field with this story.
One never knows what an individual may find annoying… or exciting. 
I wonder what real problem this new NameDrop feature solves? We can already share contact info via AirDrop. It may take a few more taps than NameDrop as I understand it (have not used it), but AirDrop works well and requires active action for both parties to work, so no security/privacy issues to worry about. Or am I missing something?
With the caveat that I haven’t used NameDrop before, one difference is that you can choose the fields and information that you want to share with someone, which I don’t think that you can do with AirDrop. AirDrop with someone not in your contacts requires also turning on the less-secure “share with anyone”. Lastly, NameDrop is a lot more simple - you don’t have to share your Apple ID or phone number as part of the transaction. Just tap the phones.
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I could picture this being extremely useful at professional conferences, after lectures, or at networking events, or even parties. A bunch of people meet who want to stay in touch. They pull out there phones and, like raising a toast, tap the others they want to stay connected to. Very streamlined.
AirDrop would share your entire Contact card, which may contain PII that you don’t necessarily want to share with a person you just met.
I remember doing this in 1998 at a party when most of my friends and I all bought Palm III PDAs. We were “beaming” the data via its IR transceiver, but it worked great and we all thought it was really cool.
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I had a Palm too! It’s crazy how in some ways we took a technological step backwards for decades before catching up!
Heck, we got our first Apple pencil recently and I was remembering writing on my Newton… 
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I had a Sharp Wizard back in the 90s and remember IR printing to an HP LaserJet at the time - 6P maybe? It was a small non-network printer. I thought that was such cool technology that took a long time to come back.
Now I feel like I’ve hardwired my current printer but it still does AirPrint even when I don’t want it to.
Diane
I recall exchanging contact info from one iPhone to another was possible with a third-party app way back, shortly after writing apps was possible. The transfer was initiated by tapping the phones together so I assume the accelerometer was part of the process to avoid spontaneous, unwanted transfers.
I haven’t used it much, but if I remember correctly AirDrop allows you to select which fields you want to share.
Fascinating.
Curious about this too. But there are a couple reasons I have a hunch NameDrop is less vulnerable to this.
- It’s near-field. So you’d have to be basically touching to leak that data
- It’s peer to peer, not broadcast. So I don’t think you have to share who you are so that the other guy can check their address book for a match.
But I’m all ears to be told I’m wrong.