Yeah, booo to cities looking to optimize affluence and patterns, hopefully for more efficient lines and service, with the help of consumer data and recurring habits, or offering convenient service as in recovering lost cards. Booo !

There is a difference between collecting usage data of their customers and also requiring the user to provide their name address etc..

Of course with enough transportation usage data (+ maybe additional external data) the identity can be reconstructed in a lot of cases, but the same entity already collecting PII does indeed sound problematic.

Do you really need to track every time that each individual move to do that?

What alternative measures would you propose for tracking volumes and trips?

Track the fact that a journey took place, but not who took it.

The organisation that runs the Tube in London, TFL, did a project[0] where they tracked the path people took by their phone's WiFi signal (all anonymised). This was used to see what routes were preferred and how they could be optimised. Previously all they had was entry/exit data.

[0] https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2017/septem...

> looking to optimize affluence and patterns, hopefully for more efficient lines and service, with the help of consumer data and recurring habits, or offering convenient service

Oh, so the exact same reason Facebook tracks you. Except, of course, that it's relatively easy to not use Facebook, but it's a real, substantial cost to not use public transport in your city (or only using single journey cash tickets).

Neither one does matter to me actually. I already expressed similar views before. It's cool to have music suggestions based on what I like and not what's popular overall. I'm fine with my city's transit department optimizing stuff for everyone, and me being one of hundred of thousands of users. I don't matter, individuals overall don't matter, and there's a significant gain from it for the community. I don't know what is so wrong with it and why people are so offended that some tech literate people don't care.

In other words, you are one of those people who uses the "I have nothing to hide" argument in favor of rampant personal data collection.

Yes, I have nothing that I, at some point, disclosed to a service or company to hide. Show me that it's implacably wrong and that it brings a global deficit for everyone and society overall then.

Fare evasion and occasionally paying for the single journey ticket might be an option, depending on your location. I know of at least a few places where it won't cost much more than a card over the long run.

It should be up to communities to make these decisions and if they value privacy more than efficiency than so be it. We shouldn't default to "Make things as efficient as possible at the cost of privacy implicitly and by default".

Fat chance of that, if you've seen just how forward-thinking, efficiency-minded, or capable most (all?) public transit authorities are.

You can recover lost cards without collecting personal data, by the way.

Same here. I also made sure to buy + top up my oyster card with cash exclusively while I lived London.