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I think your example is a bit of a straw man. Yes, they should limit the data they need to keep, but if you are really concerned about your privacy (and I wish
by SoftwareMaven 15y ago
I think your example is a bit of a straw man. Yes, they should limit the data they need to keep, but if you are really concerned about your privacy (and I wish more people were!), you can choose not to use the card. Pay for your privacy with a bit of inconvenience.
- mpclark 15y agoWell, that's an interesting comment because last time I was in London I noticed they've really jacked up the cash price of single tickets on the tube, to the point where you'd be an idiot not to get an Oyster card because using one makes multiple trips much cheaper. Differential pricing like this could be used to effectively buy people's location information.
- jfields 15y agoAn alternative strategy to limiting data is to obfuscate it at the source. If a small group of people use from a set of cards and each person pick one at random whenever they need to use it, the cards become little more than dumb tokens that cut the cost of a single trip and just happen to store trip data in the process. A single person's travel habits aren't decipherable unless every card in the set is scraped for data and the results are combined. Of course, this is effective only if all the cards stay unregistered, and if there isn't a significant monthly (or other periodic) fee per card, unless I'm looking at this situation rather naively. (I live in a rural area without access to mass transportation systems, so I'm not speaking from any kind of personal experience.)