Slashdot Mirror
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."
why everyone these days actually gathers as much data as possible and saves it for very long periods. Is it actually useful to have this data after several years? I don't mean the statistics gathered (like how many passenger there were), but the raw, personalized, data itself. Or do they hope this will make them friends within the police/government?
How about wearing jammers that confuse the electronics trying to track you?
This would be moronic. If you jam the smartcard, then the ticket gates won't let you on to the platform. The gates log the id's of the smartcards passing though them. Since they know the owner of the smartcards (which are season tickets), then they can track which stations you use.
HH
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We had an argument with the public transportation department (ytv) in the beginning of the year when "travel cards" were taken into use.
The tracking info was previously put in store for months, now it isn't permanently recorded.
Complain to your decisionmakers, it worked before.
All these are excellent suggestions. But as technology becomes more and more pervasive, it will become nearly impossible to fool all the potential tracking systems, without either severely inconveniencing yourself or breaking the law.
Ultimately this problem will only be solved at the political level. The government has to be aware that its citizens are concerned about privacy. Once enough people make noise about it, and once pro-privacy representatives start winning elections, the attitude of government and corporations will start to change. Strong legal protection of privacy is the only answer; voluntary "privacy policies" are a red herring.
However, in the current political climate, this will be an uphill climb. Most people are willing to trade off security against privacy. To force the issue, instances where personal privacy was abused with catastrophic results must be made widely known.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
I have no problem at all with the congestion charge per se - something needs to be done to improve public transport, and this is as good a way of raising funds as any other, now that the neocon regressive tax regieme instituted by Thatcher is now the default set up (the less you earn, the more tax you pay.) Encouraging people not to drifve into Central London (esp the City) is a Good Thing IMHO - I must say I appreciate the quiet & practically empty roads
However I've just had an extremely painful experience trying to pay the CC. Their website is absolutely atrocious, breaking just about every usability rule you could think of. eg navigation buttons implemented in Java??!! Why, oh why?! And trying to use it in Lynx (or links) - well, forget it. Then the actual navigation itself is completely b0rked. I imagine 90% of people arriving on the front page want either (a) a link to the "pay online now" form, or (b) the phone-number for paying by credit card. I encourage anyone with ten minutes on their hands to visit the above URL and try hunting for those bits of information. No points for getting half-way through completeing the form before realising they're actually trying to REGISTER you (as in, collect personal info) rather than just taking CC details and car registration number.
So I fired off a somewhat ranty complaint using their (equally dreadful) "contact us" stuff. Yes we've got a fancy DHTML form with a font size set unreadbaly small which stops you typing more than a couple of hundred chars. Oh and of course let's waste 70% of the screen real estate on whitespace , pointless graphics etc etc.
Today I got a response back. Of course it's a canned reply - what really put the icing on the cake was that the mail arrived with an attached HTML page (!) called something like "template.109797653-236" !! Have these people never heard of RFC822? I heard a rumour that the IT infrastructure was built by EDS, which might partly explain how utterly, utterly shite the site is.
I have similar feeliongs about the Oyster card - in theory a smart swipeable card is a good idea, and collecting anonymised data on which journeys people actually make is obviously a Good Thing for planning, resource management etc. but why do I get teh feeling that a bureacracy is rolling and, in tune with the evil schemes of Mr Blunkett, is planning to violate all alleged 'civil liberties' BY DEFAULT? If only a few civil servants would lose their pensions when the inevitable review by the EU court of human rights throws out the whole scheme... ah well a man can dream can't he...
I shall also miss the old cardboard tickets when they're finally phased out. Apart from the saddo-anal-retentive thing of keeping old tickets stamped with particular dates (elections, dead royals, and other days of special celebration) they're absolutely perfect roach material. I shall have to return to collecting old club fliers on Saturday mornings...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
Do I care if I'm seen when I go out in public? No, not at all. Sometimes I actually go out in public for the express purpose of being seen.
Do I care if I'm stalked if I go out in public? Why yes. Yes I do. Very much.
I care even more if they can do the stalking months, or even years, after the fact.
KFG
The real problem is this: your everyday actions generate a (continually growing) stream of data. But, under the present system, you don't have ownership rights to that data. There has been some recognition that you're a stakeholder who can demand corrections to some categories of data (for instance, credit reports), but it still belongs to someone else.
The law should be changed to explicitly state that you have an ownership interest in data that is derived from your transactions and movements. It may not be 100% ownership, but for the sake of argument, let's say it's 50/50. The only exception should be for journalism, since journalists are already constrained by libel laws. Then unauthorized dissemination of your personal information can fall under the increasingly draconian IP laws, and furthermore you will be entitled to a share of the revenues derived from sale of your data.
This still doesn't help with governments, but will put an economic constraint on the privatization of totalitarian control that's been progressing unchecked in developed countries.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty