2 ms·
The Washington DC Metro switched over to their equivalent a few years back, the "Smartrip Card", retiring their previous paper with mag-stripe cards in the proc
by pwg 9y ago
The Washington DC Metro switched over to their equivalent a few years back, the "Smartrip Card", retiring their previous paper with mag-stripe cards in the process.
My 'solution' to not being tracked is that the Smartrip Card I was forced to then buy was bought with cash, and has only ever been refilled with cash.
So their systems know that card # 828272823 (made up number) has traveled here or there (I don't use it much, so there's not many trips on it anyway) but they don't know 'who' is using that card.
If they ever drop the ability to use cash to top up the card, then the card will go in the garbage bin and I'll not ride the system again.
- bo1024 9y agoYour (attempted) solution illustrates the potential dangers of data collection. There are many companies with some timestamped location data about you: cell phone company, email or social media, credit card company, etc. Just a bit of that data combined with Smartrip data would de-identify you as the owner of that card, and all of your anonymity about your metro trips is lost. For example, three or four trips where you used a cell phone at either end of the trip; credit card purchases in different locations; maps directions on your phone; or so on. This is not far from plausible. I could see the DC Metro naively choosing to sell "de-identified" data to third parties, who can also purchase e.g. credit card data.
- anigbrowl 9y agoYou could just charge it up with a visa gift card or something, but (as others have pointed out) I'm betting that it's not nearly as anonymous as you think. If I'm a prosecutor trying to hang a charge on you and your Smartrip card is a key piece of evidence, all I need to do is correlate it a sufficiently tiny probability of being anyone but you and the jury will accept that.