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Smartcards to Track London Commuters
misterpies writes "Technophiles across London have been excited about the recent introduction of Oyster smartcards on public transport to replace old-fashioned paper tickets. Their enthusiasm might cool off now that London Transport has admitted that not only can the card be used to track your journey across London -- they're actually going to keep the data for 'a number of years'. Add that to their congestion charge cameras used for tracking car movements and pretty soon you'll have to stick to walking if you don't want your movements tracked. Until they implement those facial recognition systems that were such a great success in Tampa, Florida."
See also Central London webcams go dark for anti-war demo at The Register.
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In some cases, the data is not kept on the card, but more and more I run into places that want to 'swipe' various cards to input data into their systems. This is starting to become very notable in Texas, where everyone and their brother wants to swipe your TXDL while you're paying.
Degaussing my driver's license and ruining the track 1 and 2 data stored on it means that the various POS terminals that want to scan it go balls up. The manager comes over and almost invariably says 'Hmmm... Treat this like a cash payment.'
It's not perfect, but it's a step in the right direction.
Is inconvenience worth your privacy? It is for me.
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And how is this any different from the ordinary magnetic strip paper cards which has been in use for years on the Tube?
They, incidentally, also have a unique ID number linked to the registered owner's name, which is recorded together with the location and time of the exchange every time the card is used...
Ethics is what you say you do. Morals is what you actually do.
"Until they implement those facial recognition systems"
...they already have in London Borough of Newham.
Thank you for the voice of sanity in this discussion. It's been my position for some time that the best way to prevent abuse of this type of data is not to try and abolish it altogether, but to put some public accountability into the system (i.e. being able to audit the records they hold on me). After all, understanding trip patterns or customer behaviors or whatever is highly valuable information for those providing services of this type. This allows them (hopefully) to model various situations and to attempt to improve service. What I'd be curious to hear is how well people have found the system to work in London for requesting this stuff. Is there any evidence of governmental misuse of the data?
I do not have a signature
request from London Transport a copy of all information they hold on their computer systems about you and your travel movements
Or you could just do it yourself at a ticket machine.
Walk up to any of the touchscreen ticket machines and swipe your Oystercard near the big yellow card reader thingee.
Up pop a couple of options mainly to do with renewing your card - however there is one to view your usage history. I was quite interested when I saw it - as I wondered how much they tracked - so I swiped the card and got a nice list of all my trips over the last week - bus, train and tube - all with dates/times.
At least if they're logging it you can actually see for yourself what they're logging without a big effort.
Does anyone know if this trip information is stored on the Oyster Card itself, a server, or both?