Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjsuk | Hacker News Reader

Why do they need to do this? They already track people with Oyster and contactless which gives them journey information. This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering.

I'm going to sound old and curmudgeonly here, but I'm starting to miss the days when we bought paper tickets with cash.

View on HN

> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering.

I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation. They want to better understand the movement of people within the system, so they can design better stations, trains, and services.

The traditional way of understanding such passenger movements is by parking students with clipboards and people-counters all around stations, doing passenger interviews and such. This traditional methodology is not only hugely expensive, but the data it generates is spectacularly bad, and has lead to some incredibly poor planning at times.

The point that this will be only used to improve services was denied in the article itself:

"What they told people at the time was we're going to use this data to improve services. But now thanks to [Sky News] investigative reporting, we find out that it's partly to improve the services, but also it's to exploit people's data for revenue, doing advertising."

Knowing more accurate footfall counts down individual corridors is essential for better planning of stations and services. And yes, it's also a boon to pricing advertising along those corridors. No way to improve one without improving the other.

But that's literally all they're getting from this: spatially granular and accurate passenger movements. They're not collecting personally identifiable data or even aggregated demographic metadata. Just footfall counts. (Read their policies: they just collect device MAC data, which is hashed with a salt that is destroyed on a daily basis. This allows them to trace MAC addresses through the network without ever being able to trace it to an individual.) But, yes, those footfall counts are relevant to advertisers. So? TFL isn't a profit-making organisation: everything they get from advertising is re-invested in operations and new infrastructure.

Anyhow, you're trusting them with your life when you ride they're vehicles. They do a pretty good job with that. Trusting them with fleeting awareness of your MAC address seems like a much smaller ask.

This just in, our reporter has learned that telling people "secrets" make them share articles with their friends. More to come in our next clickbait article.

Using the data to optimise advertising (and ad pricing) is pretty obvious. Nobody seems to be annoyed that there's advertising in the first place, this is a non-issue.

> I know people working on this project, and that is absolutely not their motivation.

It doesn't really matter the motivation if the system that gets built in the end has the same vulnerabilities and potential for abuse.

Attitudes change, and history shows us that governments have a bad track record for sticking to original motivations. Companies are even worse, once they realize the profit potential of something.

Could you give more details of the kind of information they receive from wifi tracking that they don't already through oyster barriers and how this helps with service designs?

Just guess but: Accurate real-time data of passenger movement through the stations.

Barriers only tell you when they enter/exit, they give you no information about the routes people use, how long it takes them, how many people transfer between lines etc

They want to detect overcrowding of stations which means before people have gone through any barriers

Passenger movements within stations, and between stations where there are often many possible routes.

In most cases Oyster will only tell them where you entered the tube and where you exited. At a few exchange points you might tap out and in again but at most you will not. On a bus it will tell them where you go on but IIRC you don't tap on exit.

Tracking you by WiFi MAC address or similar techniques (I've heard of Bluetooth being used in some places) allows them to see where you went between entry and exit and how long you spent there. It will also allow them to track you outside the network when you are in range of one of their APs. The CityCOnnect WiFi in York tracks people around the city in this way, I'm sure other cities have similar arrangements.

> This is just a convenient data grab and profiteering.

I'm not sure about where direct profits might come from, but IIRC when York's city-wide WiFi started they were quite honest (or at least refreshing undeceptive) about it being a bit fo a data grab. From the council's point of view it helps them to know how people, especially visitors, navigate around the place. This can be a great help when planning changes to pedestrian signage & bus routes, and to reduce disruption when planning maintenance works on paths & roads. Of course the commercial partners will use the same data to assess advertising potentials and other such.

Oyster allows them see entry and exit, but is doesn't show what route the customer took, which lines did they take if a change was required. It also allows TFL to see where people travelled within the station concourse, how long they took, and what print advertising they would have walked past from turnstile to train.

It's notable that there's quite a few places in busy stations where the most direct route between two lines (or from one line to an exit, etc.) isn't signposted, because the footfall between them exceeds the capacity of the (typically older) direct tunnel.

They want to be able to charge advertisers more based on potential viewers of their advertisements - they probably charge a fixed fee / week for ads now, then they can go "Yeah according to our analytics a million people viewed this ad, vs 100K for the other, please pay more".

>profiteering

TfL is a not-for-profit.

So they profit, take their money, then they are not-for-profit.

You do realise this is a government body that runs public transport, right?

Public transport which is notoriously bad at making profits, all around the world.

Sorry, but this comes across as a bit of a silly conspiracy theory, by people who can't be bothered doing basic research.

End result != motivation

Bad at making profit doesn't necessarly means you're not-for-profit.

Also from the article:

TfL IS not-for-profit. I.E. any profit it gets is reinvested in London's transport infrastructure.

Sky News hasn't really done any investigative reporting here, the information is publicly available and most interested people knew about this project years ago.

Is not-for-profit not superflous on a government body supplying 50% of it's income? Who pays for the 6 figure board salaries? Is that from the profit part, or me the tax payer?

Just seems a bit stretched. never-gonna-profit

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/corporate...

"Remuneration of board members

The basic fee is £16,000 per annum. Additional fees are paid for each appointment to a Committee or Panel, up to a maximum payment of £20,000 per annum"

https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-ar...

25% of their funding seems to come from Government grants. £2.6 billion. That should be covered easy by the tax revenue London generates.

Especially so, since there's apparently a £26.5 billion tax surplus that goes out the capital to less well off regions: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/23/uk-budget-d...

So what are you complaining about exactly?

For-profit also doesn't fit well in an organisation running a bus network that spends £1.5b a year more than it takes in.

If you understand how people get from A-B (which lines, what paths within stations) you can better control overcrowding.

> Why do they need to do this?

This is explained in detail here:

http://content.tfl.gov.uk/review-tfl-wifi-pilot.pdf

If you would rather buy a paper ticket with cash you can still do that, and you won't be tracked if you put your phone into wireless mode. Personally I'm happy for them to collect limited amounts of data, with restraint, if that means they can improve the effectiveness of the network. But if you're not, that's understandable, and it's not that difficult to avoid it.

Because they don't know where people go on the system. All they know where you entered and exited.

I don't quite believe this because they could have additional readers set up that can read at a distance.

That’s nonsense and not how RFID readers should or realistically will work.

What do you mean should, are you an RF or electrical engineer of sorts?

There have been demonstrations of activists scanning in-clothes rfid identification from 100 meters across on the streets, which were used for store inventory assesment before.

How would tracking the Oyster card ID that's registered to my name, address, and credit card # in their system be an improvement compared to tracking the hashed MAC address of my phone?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com