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Comment by hosolmaz | Hacker News Reader

Nobody seems to have commented on the surveillance aspect?

I would assume contactless payments are easier to surveil compared to paper tickets, similar to cash vs credit card payments.

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You can get contactless PAYG prices without any identification in London by using an Oyster card. You can buy them from corner shops without ID, and top them up at the same places with cash.

I doubt this really affords you any extra anonymity though. Tube and rail stations are so heavily covered by CCTV, and the police have many times tracked peoples entire commutes and movement through CCTV only.

To hinder traffic analysis across multiple trips, you should also have meeting where you swap Oystercards with others, similar to how people would (and still do?) swap grocery purchase tracker cards with each other, to get the discount with less surveillance.

I used to do this with a few people.

The system breaks down when one guy stops topping up their card knowing they can be a prick about it :)

Although somebody used to have to actually sit down and comb through the footage to do that. Although not so much these days, so that point is moot.

You buy paper tickets at kiosk where camera can get close-up view of your face. Cameras can also you track when using the ticket at barrier.

Also, contactless prepaid cards can be anonymous if don’t register them or attach to credit card filling with cash. Can even swap them around with other people.

The article says that most people were buying paper tickets with cards anyway

The magnetic stripe tickets don't have a unique ID so your journey can't be tracked.

Are you sure? If they don't have unique IDs, they can be easily duplicated.

It's 1970s tech. Even if they had given them unique codes, they had no way of catching duplicates. The magnetic stripe has a very limited amount of storage space and, as far as I know, it's all used for other necessary information.

It also explains why the rail operators are moving to QR codes on paper tickets, which are in every respect worse. (They are absurdly large tickets and take much longer to scan at the barrier, creating queues.)

I think it's because it's the most obvious assumption you could make in this regard so it goes without saying :S

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