Oyster data use rises in crime clampdown
Staff and agencies
Monday March 13, 2006

Police hunting criminals are increasingly seeking information from electronically stored travel records, such as those created by users of the popular Oyster card in London.

Figures disclosed today show a huge leap in police requests to Transport for London, which operates the Oyster cards used to travel on buses, trains and the underground.

Just seven information requests were made by police in the whole of 2004, compared with 61 requests made in January this year alone…

http://technology.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1730002,00.html

This was bound to happen of course.

If you really want to have an Oyster card, (and TFL gives you a good reason to use one; bus fares are £1 with Oyster instead of £1.50 when you pay cash for example) you must:

• Make sure you have an anonymous Oyster card; you can buy them for £3
• NEVER fill your Oyster with your credit card or debit card, use only cash. If you update Oyster with a card that is connected to you, your Oyster will be connected to you via the details on the card.
• Never use someone elses Oyster. If they are a criminal, and you use their card, the police might swipe you coming off or getting on the underground*.

*Now, the last one is not true…yet, but you can guarantee that in the future the police will have realtime access to Oyster touc-ins and touch-outs. That means that when a criminal gets onto a bus, they can tell the driver not to open the doors until they get there. The same with the trains. They can tell the driver to stay in the tunnel until they get to the next station where they can sweep the whole train.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 5:30 pm and is filed under omw!, Privacy, The Law.