The new turnstiles are have slowly taken over most of the metro entry points, in the space of a few days. I wonder when I’ll have to get my first smart card.
Some friends of mine, Brian and Bruno made some interesting allegations in an article in The Link this week about the new “future metro.”
It brings up the problem of privacy and tracking. I don’t think I’ll boycott the new cards simply because I don’t want the STM to be able to follow me, but at the same time, it brings up some important issues. Most notably, I think, is the question of the measures the STM will take to protect the information on the cards. I lost my wallet a couple of days ago, luckily with my bus pas safely in my back pocket. But I wonder if, in the case of losing your card, it would be as easy to cancel and replace as a debit card. That would be really nice.
I also wonder at the RFID, or radio frequency identification systems that the card uses. It can be used for tracking, but credit cards and government communication also use the same thing. And the cell phones most of us carry are even easier to use to locate a person
Besides, the metro already uses surveillance cameras, and they’re installing more.
In fact, the federal government is giving the STM more than $3.8 million to improve their “communication and surveillance”.
March 9, 2008 at 10:29 am
Wow. What an uninformative, fear-mongering piece of crap that Link article was. I realize that these are students, and perhaps I shouldn’t expect excellence in investigative journalism, but some kind of journalism would be nice.
The piece raises legitimate concerns about the use of personal data and security of individual’s privacy… and then proceeds to make you shit your pants by asking a bunch of loaded questions, but not ANSWERING any.
Yes, your card (as opposed to you) will have a unique identifier, and the STM will track the movement of these cards. This data will be analyzed and modelled en masse in the same way as the AMT does with its origin-destination surveys so that paricipant agencies in the smart-card venture—AMT, STM, RTL, STL, Montreal’s exurban CIT’s, Quebec City’s RTC—can better adapt service hours, bus routes, devise plans for rapid or high-density transit, etc.
This analysis will most likely be collected post-hoc. Data from buses will be synchronized when they pull in to the garages, etc. To transmit this data on-the-fly is a must costlier proposition for very little value-add, unless you want to film another Bourne Identity flick.
Smart card technology is usually quite secure and have their own built in cryptographic algorithms. They are much harder to read than magnetic strips, which is why Canadian banks are moving to smart cards in the next few years.
The only data that will likely stored on your card anyway, will be the unique identifier (not tied to you except through the banking transaction purchasing it, and there would perhaps be a court order required to tie the two data sources together) and the code saying what type of travel privilege you’ve stored on it (e.g. CAM for March 2008; Weekly student pass; 10 rides) I doubt that tracking data of movement would actually be stored on the card.
All of what I’ve written above contains a lot of conjecture and guesswork, but no more so than what The Link wrote. Your comments on tracking seem level headed—let’s try and keep it that way.
March 9, 2008 at 6:35 pm
Hey Tim,
I’m one of the authors of the Link article linked to above and I just wanted to say that it is by no means proper journalism. It was a fluff piece for the Science And Technology issue and as such we were given the liberty to be creative, which we were. Part of the special issue had an undertone of distrusting Big Brother to an absolutely ridiculous degree (there was a piece about Google owning the entire world, written from the perspective of someone from the future looking back)
They were simple musings and nothing more, which is why it definitely was not destined for the news section. Notice the lack of quotes and proper journalistic structure? The comment about thrusting body parts to gain entry? The spider graphic? Those are all indices that we were definitely not aiming for proper hard journalism.
We asked a lot of absolutely loaded questions, there’s no denying that. The piece was meant to make people think about issues of privacy and public transportation.
A proper news piece about this is forthcoming, with a lot of answers from a lot of officials involved in the transition.
March 10, 2008 at 8:00 am
Hi Brian,
Ahhhh… Good to hear! On The Link website the piece has none of surrounding context. And while it had none of the stylings of a journalistic endeavour (at first I figured it was a letter to the editor, then I saw it was classified as a Special Issue) I figured it was a chosen opinion piece, or worse, sign of the degrading standards in news today (cf. Fox).
Taking a chill pill,
Tim