information for example the present invention is particularly applicable to data that is desired to be transportable such as by being carried on the person or the like such data may be provided in any form such as an alphanumeric graphical or image based form personal data may include personal information such as a person 39 s name address account numbers bank codes and the like biometric data may be a finger print identification face feature identification eye feature identification face image electronic signature identification or other means to specifically identify an individual person in any case the data preferably comprises storable data that is desired to be stored in a secure encrypted form and printed or otherwise provided onto a card in a secure manner after the data is identified an encoding step is preferably used to encode the data such encoding is used to put the data into digital form and may include steps of storing data in memory entering data by keying with a keyboard or the like reading data from a magnetic strip of a card creating images or pictures as well a scanning a thumbprint or eye scan or other biometric based data preferably a software coding process is used and such software coding of data can be done by any desired technique for example data to be encoded can be converted to a binary stream of ones and zeros the binary information can then be further encrypted to allow error detection and correction edac reed solomon error correction now used by almost all 2d bar codes is a byte correcting scheme that is widely used for digital.