BBC Online

Monday, 13 March 2006, 20:57 GMT

Oyster data is ‘new police tool’

Police are increasingly turning to Oyster travel cards to track criminals’ movements, according to new figures.

The smartcards, used by five million Londoners, record details of each bus, Tube or train journey made by the holder over the previous eight weeks.

In January, police requested journey information 61 times, compared with just seven times in the whole of 2004.

The Metropolitan Police said it was a “straightforward investigative tool” used on a case-by-case basis… […]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/4800490.stm

This sounds entirely reasonable, except when you take a close look at the facts.

Oyster doesn’t need to record eight weeks of your journeys in order to do the job it has to do; charge you for using public transport.

Unless of course it has been designed to track you.

All they need to store is how much money you have left on your card, so that when it is swiped, you can be debited and let on the bus or underground. A clean, non orwellian system could do this, and would actually cost them less to run since they would not be storing up all those journey details and making infrastructure available to others to provide access to the data.

And as for ‘case by case basis’ in the MSQL era, case by case means looking at every journey with a search query, or looking at swipes in real time, as they are done, one by one, case by case.

Amazingly, they have not yet put cameras on every Oyster swipe point. Imagine that every time you tap to get on a bus, a camera stuck on top of the reader inside the drivers cabin, takes a photo of you. This would render anonymous Oysters useless, since your face would be linked to the number of your card.

Maybe a feature for ‘Oyster 2.0’.

Oyster is no “straightforward investigative tool”. Surveillance on this scale has never been possible before, and in the past, if you wanted to do it, you needed explicit permission and a real reason to follow someone as they went about their daily business…it used to be called ‘putting a tail on someone’.

Looking into the future, Oyster is going to allow you to buy newspapers and stuff whereever there is n Oyster terminal. They have five million users; a huge userbase to turn loose on the shops of London. They will of course, record all of those transactions as well. The problem is not that they can and will do this; the real problem comes when this is the only way that you can buy and sell anything anywhere.

A state issued currency card, that can be filled up from your bank account, or from other cards via a simple two slot terminal similar to those Chip and Pin machines that are now everywhere, will spell the end of financial privacy. The system operators (the Bank of England) will keep a record of every transaction you make. Barter and any type of trade that excludes money will be made illegal, since they will be ‘off system’. Don’t think this can happen? The outlawing of all other forms of currency in favour of the state currency has already been done at least once; in Las Vegas, people used to use casino chips to buy anything. These chips were all redeemable for cash at the issuing casino so they were as good as money for all purposes. When this chip economy got huge, it was outlawed because private transactions began to dissapear into the invisible chip economy. The response will be the same if a state issued currency card comes into being.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Privacy.