What changes about NFC from one sector to another?

When the sector changes the answer

Most questions about NFC have one answer wherever they are asked. How far a tag reads, what NDEF is, why a tag fails on metal: the trade of the person asking changes nothing.

Some questions change completely. A tag on a restaurant table is wiped with a wet cloth several times a day. A tag on a listed monument cannot be fixed with anything that leaves a mark, and the permission to fix it comes before the hardware. A tag in a school records minors. A tag in a hospital meets a disinfection routine that eats adhesives.

Those are the pages in this section. Where the sector makes no difference, the answer lives in the section that owns the subject, and duplicating it here would only create two pages to keep in agreement.

The three things a sector changes

What the tag survives. Cleaning products, grease and heat in a kitchen; weather and a pressure washer outdoors; disinfection in a ward; a wash cycle in a hotel laundry. The construction follows from that, and the tags and cards section holds the constructions themselves.

What the tag may hold. A pupil, a patient, a resident or an employee in the data changes the question from a technical one into one about what you are allowed to record and for how long, which is where the security and privacy section starts.

And who taps. A hotel guest arriving at midnight, a museum visitor with no signal in a basement gallery, a security guard on a round who would rather not walk it: each is a different reader, and the design that suits one fails the next.

Sector rules vary by country

A sector often has rules that decide part of the answer, and those rules are national more often than not. These pages say which question to ask and who can answer it, and they name a framework only where the source names it.

Food service is the clearest example. regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 on food information to consumers makes allergen information mandatory for food sold without prepackaging, and then leaves each Member State to set the means by which it is provided. So the question is not whether a tag is allowed, it is what your Member State accepted as provision, which the menu page sets out.

Nothing in this section is legal advice, and nothing in it replaces reading the rule that applies where you operate.

What stays in the other sections

The physics and the hardware stay in understanding NFC and tags and cards. What goes on the tag stays in writing NFC tags. Wi-Fi sharing, routines and home automation stay in automation.

Running a deployment, its cost, its signage and its handover stay in NFC for business, which is the section most of these pages point back to.

Each guide here names the page it is a special case of. If you arrive from a search with a general question, that link is the one to follow.