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."

Comments

Paying for privacy...

[JohnGrahamCumming]

With the Oyster Card (official web site is here: http://www.oystercard.com) you can
in a sense "opt out" if you are willing to pay more. Since the cards are mandatory
for people who buy season tickets, you can choose to have privacy at a fee by buying
individual tickets (which will remain on paper for some time).

Here in New York the Metrocard system offers some opportunity for tracking users
because the card have a unique ID and could be linked to credit card or debit card
information (and hence to you) if you buy the card at a machine with card. You often
see ads in the subway encouraging people to reuse their cards, for environmental
reasons, of course, but that does seem to me to help anyone who wanted to get long
term data on your travel habits.

Luckily, most Metrocard machines still accept cash for the anonymous purchase, and
then you can throw it away after your limited set of journeys.

Similarly, you can pay extra for a little bit of privacy on road tolls, New York's
EZPass system is cheaper (and quicker) than the cash toll, but less private. (Unless
you count those little cameras staring at your license plate of course).

John.

Re:Paying for privacy...

[corbettw]

"Similarly, you can pay extra for a little bit of privacy on road tolls, New York's
EZPass system is cheaper (and quicker) than the cash toll, but less private. (Unless
you count those little cameras staring at your license plate of course)."

Seems the EZPass system has been a guest star on "Law & Order" more times than the woman who plays the original psychiatrist. From those appearances (only because I can't think of any real life instances, and Law & Order seems, in some ways, one of the more realistic cop drama shows on TV), I wouldn't worry too much about any tracking systems. The cops still need a judge to sign a warrant to get any of it, which means you have to be under suspicion for some crime, with some (at least token) amount of evidence already against you before they can start going through the logs to see where you've been. They need much less than the to go through your garbage, since once it's on the street, it's fair game.

I'm much more concerned about laws passed by Congress, or Parliament, or the State House, or the UN General Assembly, or our new insect overlords, banning thoughts and political affliations, than I am the ability of some group to track what you're doing and where you've been. The truth of it is, noone really cares.

Besides all that, let's say they do build a system to track every Londoner's use of the tube. There's, what?, 20 million people in London? Let's say 5 million use the tube everyday. Now let's say each record in the db uses 256B of space. Even at that extremely tight level of data storage you're still talking about a database that grows at the rate of over 2 GB of data per day, assuming each person who uses the tube uses it twice per day. Do you know how long it would take to go back in time and track one person's movements over a five year period? Do you *really* think that's going to be useful to anyone?

Ask anyone with experience with datawarehousing: this kind of system is *great* for working with aggregates, but absolutely sucks for drilling down to an individual.

Re:Paying for privacy...

[SatanicPuppy]

Same deal with the old E-Z-Pass system on the Turnpike.

This whole privacy issue gets to me sometimes. Where is a right to privacy when you're riding on the subway? In your house, sure. But a right to privacy in a public place? What's the big deal unless you're going to kill someone, and you're worried that they'll track your movements (They did this in New York once, with the aforementioned E-Z-Pass system--proved that a person HAD entered the city at a time when they claimed they hadn't).

If I'm doing something in public, I don't really care if someone sees it. If I cared, it wouldn't be public. This kind of stuff is only going to get worse, as methods of information gathering get more sophisticated. Might as well get used to it now.

Profiling and tracking sucks.

[grub]

Simple solution: swap your transit passes with your friends when you get together.

SCREW PROFILING, some ways to poison the well:

Swap supermarket "discount cards" with friends. (friend and I swap Safeway Club Cards when we get together)

Never give the right answers on surveys. Postage-paid mail in ones are the best. Make them think you go through 12 boxes of Kotex Extra Fluffy Pads a month even though it may just be you in your mom's basement.

Air Miles cards? Flying is cheap enough without my purchasing info being pored over by scumbag marketers.

Places that ask for your phone number? Give them a local massage parlour's number. (yes, I have one memorized for that purpose)

When entering your name somethere use a bogus middle initial so you know which firm sold your info when mail starts coming in with a wrong middle letter. If you get junk, return it as "Moved".

Bah, this is way off topic (mod me to hell) but it felt good. Time to check the tinfoil on my hat.

I have one

[EnglishTim]

I was thinking about this. I recently got one, and I was thinking that at the end of the month I would request all the data that London Underground holds on me. By law, under the Data Protection Act they have to give me all the info they hold for a small fee (capped at 10 if I recall correctly).

It will be interesting to see what they store..

(Also, they are not permitted to share that information with anyone else without my permission)

Another one

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

# When entering your name somethere use a bogus middle initial so you know which firm sold your info when mail starts coming in with a wrong middle letter. If you get junk, return it as "Moved".

I did something similar to this once, but worse for the companies. I was living in a dorm, and we got a MASS mailing from a credit card company. Three bags of mail came in that day. One was completely filled with credit card offers. Many people got more than one.

Well that was too much. So I rounded up everyone by the mail desk, and asked them to open their offers, tear out anything with their name on it, and mail the offer, and torn up envelope back using the postage-paid envelope sent by the company.

That way, they have to pay the postage, pay someone to open the mail, and pay extra while that person tries to figure out exactly what he's holding in his hand.

Sort of like calling telemarketers at home... The old -taste-of-your-own-medicine- ploy.

Indeed you are...

[irn_bru]

However, you are also able to - under data Protection and Human Rights legislation - see a copy of all images which may have been taken of you by these video cameras, both those operated by the Government (Traffic, CCTV, etc) and comercially (Storecams, car parks...). In many cases this is subject to a payment of an 'appropriate' fee, not exceeding 10. The body in question then has to review the footage they have taken on a particular date and forward onto you a copy of all film/video which contains pictures of you. For more information take a llok at this request form at Mark Thomas' web site.

The legislation is just as relevant in this case and it would be possible to request from London Transport a copy of all information they hold on their computer systems about you and your travel movements. Then it might be possible to decide just how paranoid to become. Alternatively - just take the bus.

This may sound like 1984...

[canfirman]

...but it is of some concern.

Let's face it: in our digital age, privacy has become a scarce commodity. We just have to surf the net and wonderful items such as cookies and spyware are downloaded to our machine at no additional cost. Not to mention corporate internet tracking tools to see what employees are surfing.

And what about credit card information? Why should I have somebody analyze my purchases to determine what I buy? Or, retail companies who analyze sales data by region (even right down to the household). If I want to buy from your store, I will.

As much as people say, "You're information will not be shared with anybody else...", I personally don't believe it. That's like saying we can carry a water with a siv.

The old addage of, "Well, if you do nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear..." is a load of crap. Why should we have anything to track our movements? All we need is somebody to say something is illegal/unethical/etc, and they can find out who's been going to those "illegal/unethical/etc" places (whether on the net or on the street).

People have been crying to governments for years for privacy, but it seems governments cannot keep up with technology. Heck, even governments allow this kind of activity. There's been quite a controversy over street cameras here in Canada, whether they be cameras to patrol the streets to stop crime, to photo-radar to stop speeding, to red-light cameras...with no proof it stops crime.

I know this sounds too much like a rant, but what I'd like to know is what can we do about it? We cry when our privacy is invaded, but how can we protect it? I'm looking for some realistic and practical solutions (blowing up governments is not a practical solution :-) ).

Thanks.

I'v said it before and I'll say it again

[TyrranzzX]

The reason people have problems with any information gathering system is because the more information you have on a person, the more power you have over them.

If I know all kinds of things about you I can then engauge in, for example, black ops to eliminate you if you do something I don't like. Slip some cianide into your food while you leave it in your car or the like.

Point here is, nobody trusts the goverment and rightly so. More often than not the law is abused horribly. Plus, if a new law is passed and the goverment has computers than can instantly tell what you've been doing, and can then launch a lawsuit against you, what is going to happen to the rapists and real killers? The system's going to be so swamped it isn't even funny plus what if they decide they'll just abduct people at random without trial and throw them into prison labor camps?

All you're going to do with this kind of system is creat criminals who are smarter and better equiped to fight the law. Plus, with the shotty record of large corperations; communisum failed becuase nobody was motivated to make good stuff, capitalism will fail becuase damn near everybody is so greedy they're trying to essentially bait and switch everybody into buying crap. What's more profitable? Selling you a watch that is a good one or selling you one that'll break in 6 months, is inexpensive to manufacture but looks expensive on the outside?

So what do you want to bet that whever you're buying from goverment agencies is crap?