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If you paid for it with your credit card, then it certainly is linked to your name. And not a lot of people use cash these days
by usrnm 5y ago
If you paid for it with your credit card, then it certainly is linked to your name. And not a lot of people use cash these days
- ace2358 5y agoThe purchase of credit can be linked for sure. But at least my trips can’t be tracked. I can say, use anyone’s travel card. Anyone can top up my card. I can top up with cash. Whatever. Each individual trip can’t be tied to a person. We don’t want to lose this privacy because as mentioned. We’ll never get it back.
- lozf 5y ago> But at least my trips can’t be tracked. Sorry to break it to you but I'm pretty sure that unless you're actively swapping Oyster cards with random strangers, the pattern of metadata of where and when that card enters and exits the Underground or Overground, or when it takes a bus ride (and the route number at least) can soon yield a useful collection of data points (which in turn can be cross-referenced with CCTV timestamps) for any "authority" that's interested in tracking you.
- bobthepanda 5y agoIt’s still nice for people who may not have (local) bank accounts, namely poor people and tourists. IIRC you can’t have a WeChat pay account without a Chinese bank account.
- tialaramex 5y agoMost tourists should find their contactless card or equivalent (e.g an iPhone) just works. There may be a brief extra pause, especially the very first time you touch a gate, as the system figures out that yes this is a payment card, and yes it can afford to pay for a journey on the network. So, probably don't choose peak time at a crowded station to find out if your card or phone works. I would much prefer if this was true for most public transit networks in the world, including the rest of the UK.
- MillenialMan 5y agoMany banks charge a hefty premium for overseas purchases, and they tend to charge per purchase.
- Nextgrid 5y agoTfL settles every 24 hours, so you'll only have a single purchase per 24H regardless of how many journeys you've taken. I'd also argue that in this case the fault is on the cardholder for being with a shit bank when better options exist in the vast majority of countries.
- MillenialMan 5y agoI think that's an absurd requirement to levy on tourists and oyster cards are a perfectly reasonable solution.
- bobthepanda 5y agoThat would be most American banks.
- afarrell 5y agoThe US does not have contactless credit cards. Britain has a financial and national security interest in American tourists — who will need oyster cards.
- ryanlol 5y agoWait, what? All my US cards except for the metal amexes have been contactless for years. All of them also support apple pay.
- pfranz 5y agoI have 2 Mastercards and 1 Visa. Only one of the Mastercards support contactless. The one without foreign transaction fees doesn't. It's also been vary hard to find a chip+pin card (without an annual fee) instead of a chip+signature even though it's been around for what, 20 years now?
- tialaramex 5y agoYou can fill an anonymously purchased Oyster with actual coins at select locations. I used to fill mine with otherwise useless small change periodically. In this way the Oyster is not tied to a credit card, although of course TFL does have CCTV so if they really wanted to (e.g. you murder somebody and leave the card at the scene) they could trawl through the CCTV footage matching the times the card was used.
- rwmj 5y agoMy Oyster is anonymous (ish, apart from surveillance). I only ever topped it up with cash.