Iris Scans and Fingerprints Could Be Your Ticket On British Rail (silicon.co.uk)

Mickeycaskill quotes a report from Silicon.co.uk: Rail passengers could use fingerprints or iris scans to pay for tickets and pass through gates, under plans announced by the UK rail industry. In its current form, the mobile technology is intended to allow passengers to travel without tickets, instead using Bluetooth and geolocation technology to track a passenger's movements and automatically charge their travel account at the end of the day for journeys taken. The Rail Delivery Group (RDG), which represents train operators and Network Rail, said further development could see passengers identified using biometric technology in a way similar to the facial-recognition schemes used at some UK airports to speed up border checks. The RDG said more than 200 research, design and technology projects have been identified to increase the railways' capacity and improve customer service. Other projects include new seat designs that could improve train capacity by up to 30 percent and folding seats that could boost space during peak times, including tables that could fold into seats.

Comments

You don't want to enable TERRORISTS, do you?

[Frosty Piss]

Not surprising given the Brits obsession with CCTV and license plate scanners. It will probably be this way everywhere soon. I mean, you don't want to enable TERRORISTS, do you? And think of the children.

Unrevokable keys...

[StarryEyed]

...that can be stolen with any camera phone! What could possibly go wrong?!

Re:Unrevokable keys...

[quenda]

Its worse than that. Fingerprints are not hashable. So when somebody hacks the British Rail database, millions of fingerprints may hit the black market.

And you know you should never re-use passwords.

Not About Safety

[Anonymous Coward]

This type of government overreach is intended to track every one of us, everywhere, at all times. The whole point is to crack down on dissent. Every government is moving in this direction.

This has nothing to do with safety or security. Do nothing and watch your liberty disappear.

They're missing the point.

[newcastlejon]

Actually getting on the train isn't where people waste time. It takes ten times as long to find the ticket you need to buy from the dozen or so alternatives with slightly different names and wildly diverging prices (that are all nevertheless exorbitant) as it does to walk through an automated barrier.

I had to travel from one end of the UK to the other recently and - this still baffles me - it would have cost about a third as much to fly from Newcastle via Paris to Exeter then back again than it would to get an off-peak return ticket for the train. I'd have probably had more leg room to boot. If I still had a passport I'd have been very tempted to accidentally miss my connecting flight. Think about that for a second... an international flight was significantly cheaper and only marginally longer than taking the train. Something about that just seems fundamentally broken.

And yet, after all this, one still has to have the train actually turn up; in the case of Southern Rail this is not a safe bet. If - and that's a big if - this ticketing system reduces the prices then I'll give it a try but the train companies do not have a good track record (sorry!) when it comes to refraining from bleeding their customers dry. Something similar already works quite well on buses and the Tube so who knows? I'll try to contain my amazement when the whole thing falls flat on its face and people go back to having to use price comparison websites to find a ticket without needing a mortgage to pay for the blasted thing.

Re:They're missing the point.

[TheRaven64]

They've stopped doing free delivery for tickets ordered online and they've removed discounts for advanced purchase. The result of the latter is that there's no point booking the ticket in advance, so they no longer have any idea how many people are planning on taking any given train (not they they did much with that information anyway). The outcome of the former is that if you buy your ticket online, you have to collect it from a machine, whereas if you buy it on the day then you can collect it from a human or a machine. If you want a shorter queue, don't buy your ticket in advance - in the worst case, the machine queue is shorter and you're no worse off.

The fees are weird. It's sometimes cheaper to buy a ticket that goes one stop further than you need (often a lot cheaper) and just get off early. You're allowed to break your trip with most ticket classes, so this is only ever a problem for returns (where if you don't start at the correct point, they can complain).

The rolling stock is often completely inappropriate to task. For example, the trains to Stansted Airport have a tiny luggage rack at the end of each carriage. Apparently they think that most people going to the airport won't have any checked luggage. If they'd ever been on one of the trains, they'd know this is entirely wrong.

I guess there's a reason that 70% of the British public are in favour of nationalising the railways.

Re:They're missing the point.

[mikael]

The problem is that there are so many commuters traveling by train into and out of London that they try and get the load spread through off-peak hours through pricing. And people are commuting from outside of London because of the problems of gang crime and that housing in safe areas is unaffordable - much of the brownfield sites are having huge apartment developments which are simply sold off to international investors in the Far East and Russia

So if you try and take a train from Liverpool (West Coast) at 8am to Folkestone (East Coast, through London) at 3pm, they figure "oh, you are going through London at peak hours, we better charge you". They tried to charge me around £800 because my journey was at peak times and went through London. I did a ticket split and reduced the price down to just over £200 (which is more than a return ticket to New York in the USA).

In other parts of the country like Portsmouth, the train station is actually partially over water as it is right next to a ferry terminal. If you take the ferry to the train station, then there is exactly one ticket machine between the platforms and the ferry terminal exits. Sometimes there are only minutes between getting up the exit ramps and your train departing. There simply isn't time to wait 10 in line in a queue to book a ticket. A monthly season pass is the best bet.

At other stations the biggest holdup is the ticket inspectors who close the barriers at rush hour and try and inspect each ticket individually. On the Isle of Wight you can pay for a ticket while on the train. On the mainland it's a criminal offense not to have paid for a ticket before getting on board a train.

Re:They're missing the point.

[mrbester]

Re-nationalising.

It's not so much the new rolling stock (when it gets delivered, a happy little clusterfuck in itself), with vastly inferior seats (but look, charging points for your stuff! Never mind that there's no tables any more and it can't connect to anything because the signal is so dire; why is the Clapham Triangle still a thing?), nor even the piss-poor uptake in new drivers so the existing have to work far more overtime to provide the alleged standard service.

What annoys customers is that the operators coin it in by claiming from RailTrack after only a 5 minute delay caused by signal or track issues but customers can only claim after half an hour delay (though there was a concession recently down to "just" 15 minutes). Then there's the whole issue with Southern Rail getting paid by DfT (who get the ticket revenue) as a flagship test case for a pure management franchise to be rolled out to the rest of the country so they don't even have to try to run a service as they get paid anyway. And don't get me started on DOO(P) for rural areas...

Not for me - Tinfoil Hat

[Master Moose]

I would like my methods of payment and my physical being to be as separate as possible.

It is invasive enough at the moment that public transport wants to 'force' traceable and easily tracked methods of payment in the name of autonomy and convenience (see Data Collection) and while I doubt they have very little interest in my specific transactions or movements - this doesn't sit easy with me.

Again, my underwear drawer is clean - this doesn't mean I want to give everyone permission to look through it.

Free Data

[U8MyData]

Really, the only thing left for those who are not incarcerated is, "Just give us a sample of your DNA. We already have everything else." I wonder long term what kind of effect this will have on humankind. If you develop a sense that nothing you do is private, then you become nothing more than a slave to those who have access to the data mine. These agencies have access to so much information, you must now assume that they know more about you than you. I have also wondered who audits this data and can they guarantee authenticity and integrity?

Fingerprints should not be used

[markdavis]

and iris scans are an improvement, but there is something better (faster, cheaper, less abuse potential)...

Using fingerprints and allowing third-parties and governments to have access to that data is unacceptable. Not only because the government should have no need to track what people are doing but because the gov should not have fingerprint registration data (which will be horribly abused) . Once you give this data to the government (or big business), it will NEVER be erased or restricted, regardless of claims or laws- it will go into huge databases and shared between all agencies and used however they want for as long as they want. Even worse, with every crime investigation, you will be searched without probable cause.

There is only one safer and practical biometric I know of- that is deep vein palm scan. That registration data cannot be readily abused. It can't be latently collected like DNA, fingerprints, and face recognition can. You have to know you are registering/enrolling when it happens. You don't leave evidence of it all over the place. When you go to use it, you know you are using it every time. And on top of all that, it is accurate, fast, reliable, sanitary, unchanging, live-sensing, and cheap. If you must participate in a biometric, this is the one you should insist on using.

Example: http://www.m2sys.com/palm-vein...
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Regardless, we also need to realize that IT IS NOT EVERYONE'S BUSINESS WHAT WE ALL DO. The first step in securing freedom is privacy. When you are tracked, you are losing your freedom, whether you realize it or not. Anonymous purchasing and traveling should be a right, not a harassment.

Re:or

[mrbester]

There's already a contactless card, similar to Oyster, called the Key. Unfortunately, you can't keep both in the same place or you get charged on both in certain regions...

Re:This will be awesome!

[arglebargle_xiv]

I'm puzzled about the fact that they're pitching it as a cost-cutting measure. Won't having to hire people to stand next to the fingerprint readers constantly wiping them with cleaning solution so they continue to function increase rather than decrease costs?

Re:Wisdom follows, pay attention!

[serviscope_minor]

The problem with rail in Britain is not the lack of iris scans and other biometrics, but the lack of electric traction.

No that's utter crap. Southern Rail are fully electrified in London and they're still utterly shite. Th problem is that the government is wildly incompetent and seems incapable of running a rail system. Oh also, the Tories basically hate Londoners because they never vote Tory, so they seem to be enjoying fucking over people who always don't vote for them.

So actually the problem is that they ar both incompetent AND a bunch of cunts.

Diseel traction has nothing to do with it.