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Oyster Cards?

23:32 / 28.10.05

So, like many other Londeners i've been forced into getting an Oyster card to travel on London Transport. I'd left it to the last minute, until they did away with weekly travelcards, and then i got the shiny card that'll spin me through the gates faster. But i am quite uneasy by the amount of infomation they carry. Obviously my name and address etc when you get one(although i found mine!) but also the exact time i get on and off a bus, the number and whereabouts of the bus, the times of going in or out of the Underground.

I guess when i looked on the top up screen and had all my previous weeks journeys shown to me i got one of those, Fuck Scary BB moments. It doesn't help that when you get in a tube station you have a disembodied voice telling that it is SMART, FAST AND CHEAP.

So, does it really freak anyone else out or is it just me?

08:14 / 29.10.05

You are not alone. I resisted the little blue monsters as long as I could too...

09:14 / 29.10.05

I've refused to actually put my name on Oyster for exactly this reason, luckily I live close enough to the centre that I can take a bus one way and jog the other way, every day of the work week, so I just use Pre Pay, as it works out cheaper for me.

I still find myself thinking whether not having my name makes any difference, they're still analysing my movement, could quickly deduce my starting/alighting points and use of the transport system for their marketing needs, evaluating my dependency on their transport.

It does make me feel uncomfortable.

Having visions of Minority Report type advertising. :-)

13:12 / 29.10.05

I've stuck to an unregistered Oyster card since they came out, so my identity is unknown, but my travel habits are presuambly still recorded. The thing is, I always thought it was the same with the old paper tickets - monthly cards required ID and photo and the magnetic strip (as far as I'm aware) recorded your trips anyway, so I think the Oyster card can actually add anonymity.

Probably all academic anyway, considering the amount of cameras around the places (unless the Met police are chasing you with guns).

17:49 / 29.10.05

Supaglue is quite right; you don't have to register an Oyster unless it's for more than a weekly Travelcard. They want you to use them because the logistics of dealing in cash are horrendous. There's no more information gathered than there is with tickets.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

12:36 / 30.10.05

I tried really hard not to get one, but now you need it even for a bus pass. I registered it under the name Luther Blisset, though.

pointless & uncalled for

11:25 / 31.10.05

One of the many reasons I choose to travel around the city by bicycle, the only true embodiment of SMART FAST CHEAP. I already carry a lot of ID already, I just couldn't countenance carrying a new ID simply to take the bus.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

08:20 / 02.11.05

I moved closer to work, and walk.

That way, I avoid BB style paranoia, the paranoia that I am going to get blown sky high by some fundie dickhead with a grudge and a backpack full of explosives, I avoid shitty gnarly bus drivers who wished they were prison wardens but couldn't get the gig, I avoid ignorant fuckbake Londoner's who refuse to give up a seat for a guy carrying a small child, even when the bus is lurching around all over the place, and fucking hell, I haven't used the Tube for at least 18 months anyway - it's a fucking disease ridden, environmental disaster, avoid it at all costs.

I avoid ill people, smeezing in my face, I avoid the lurching, crappy start-stop shitty bus rides driven by idiots with absolutely no understnading or at least care for the laws of inertia, and I get to talk to my son all morning and on the way home in the fresh air. It's fucking marvellous. Plus, walking takes me just 20 minutes longer than a bus ride, due to the shit roads in London anyway.

So, if you can, I highly recommend it. Move near to where you work, like about 3-4 miles away. It's green! It's healthy! The Conspiracy don't know where you are, whree you're going, or where you've been!

Failing that, fuck Oyster. Buy or obtain a weekly Bus Pass once per month...people often leave out of date one's lying around when they expire.

Scan it in to Photoshop. Obtain plenty of other cards. You need them for the numbers and months. Scan them in to Photoshop. Use the various magic cutting and pasting tools to make your own weekly Bus Pass.

Print it out on appropriate card...Insert it in your card wallet thingy. Flash it to the frankly bored senseless and checking no-one gets on through the wrong doors bus driver.

Grin smugly at your M4D 4N4RCH15T 5K1LL3!!

(You may want to always carry £1.20 in case an on board inspector turns up and wants to have a really close look. Just pay a single fare).

Come on people, get with the goddamn Century already.

11:00 / 02.11.05

Failing that, fuck Oyster. Buy or obtain a weekly Bus Pass once per month...people often leave out of date one's lying around when they expire.

Trouble is, weekly bus passes are only going to be available on oyster soon and single tickets are going up to £2.

And I got caught on a bendy bus without a ticket and the inspector wouldn't take £1.20 - he wrote me a fine for a tenner.

Sorry for the thread rot.

11:01 / 02.11.05

And don't moan about how shitty the whole thing is when you're determined not to pay any money towards it.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

11:09 / 02.11.05

Any money, no. Reasonable rates, yes.

The C Charge, when it was introduced, was supposed to guarantee low tube and train fares for those that left their vehicles behind in favour of public transport.

The fares were raised the same month it was introduced. Now it has gone up by £3 per day, the fares are being raised again

Ken lIvingstone can suck donkey cocks, and quite possibly does.

They keep going up (daily bus pass now £3...why?), while the service gets worse and worse. I used to buy weekly passes, now I walk.

If it's pissing down, I Photoshop a pass.

So sue me.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

11:10 / 02.11.05

Oh, and a plastic magnetic strip - ID that tracks my journeys round the capital, logging times, dates, and exit and entry?

No, thanks very much, but no.

11:14 / 02.11.05

They keep going up (daily bus pass now £3...why?), while the service gets worse and worse.

Now is this really true?

We are seeing MORE services and a massive renewall of Bus infrastructure. New buses, new routes, you might not like the service you are getting, but it IS being conspiciously improved.

11:35 / 02.11.05

But Oyster card holder's fares are due to halve in the next couple of months if what I've read is true. I'll see if I can find a link.

I think Sleaze is right - Ken seems to have a genuine intention to improve transport, and improve the enironment: congestion charge soon to become a pollution charge, more buses, bendy buses (however right or wrong, certainly well intentioned), infrastructure spending on the tube, etc. Don't know whether he sucks Donkey-cock though. I hope he does. He looks the sort.

Everyone fair dodges from time to time, and I don't care or mind if people do, but you have to be aware that you're not helping the situation.

As for the plastic strip that tracks your journey - fair enough, but you can be watched walking pretty much anywhere in central London by CCTV (and on the buses - fake ticket or otherwise).

The strips on the tube/bus cards may be able to tell the time and destination of your journey but there's no link to you personally unlesss you're a registered Oyster user. To me, time, date and destination and that sort of information is no different to what is recorded at a till when you buy something in a store.

Tryphena Absent

11:44 / 02.11.05

And so what if there is a link to you? What are they going to do with it? Possibly send you some mail through the post documenting special offers... eventually the information might be good enough to actually offer you something you want! Please tell me what you think they're going to do with the information?

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

11:51 / 02.11.05

Now is this really true?

If I get a bus, which is rare, it's a 168.

Yes, it's true. Painfully, painfully true.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

12:04 / 02.11.05

Nina - So, the 'loads and loads of people knowing nearly everything about you' you express concern about in this thread doesn't extend to the authorities knowing exactly where you are and where you've been at any given time, then?

And your understandable concern in this thread about '[not] trust[ing] the police not to misuse this information because they are going to have access to it and you're mad if you think that this won't make it easier for them... On top of that I don't want my prescence at demonstrations charted, I don't want my medical records shown at the touch of a button to anyone who has access to the system...I do view it as an intrusion of my privacy...' has been assuaged since, I take it?

Even taking on board that not all Oyster Card users need to register their card (yet), I personally, would not want one. I just don't like people keeping tabs on me, I'm afraid, and even with the tin foil hat safely back in the drawer, and the collander used exclusively for washing lettuce, I especially don't want the information gleaned from it to be used by cheesey fuckwits trying to foist yet more of their useless, stupid, over-marketed, pointless crappy wares on me. I've got everything I need, I don't want anything else.

12:36 / 02.11.05

Here's that link. Oyster fares are to drop by 20p peak and 40p off-peak on the bus, and 50p or so off the tube

So it will be become cheaper if you pre-pay for a bus ticket for Oyster.

On top of that I don't want my prescence at demonstrations charted, I don't want my medical records shown at the touch of a button to anyone who has access to the system...I do view it as an intrusion of my privacy...' has been assuaged since, I take it?

Really an anti-ID card argument and nothing to do with Oyster cards. No plans as far as I know to combine the two, so Perhaps it should stay in that thread?

If there was no option but to give details of a personal nature I would be as against Osyters as I am ID cards, but as I've said in every post, if you have concerns - DON'T REGISTER YOUR CARD. And use cash to update it, rather than a bank card. Then they can't keep tabs on you.

Just out of interest, do you not buy things with a credit/bank card in shops out of the same principle?

Do you not walk in Central London or anywhere else that has CCTV because they can keep tabs on you?

12:49 / 02.11.05

I think the fresh air argument is a bit bizarre, though I do walk everywhere I can (safely that is). On my walk to work (along Old Street, Clerkenwell Road, Theobalds Road) I probably inhale the equivalent of 4 cigs' worth of carcinogens...

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

13:07 / 02.11.05

Haha! True enough. For fresh read 'as fresh as air gets in Central London'.

Same stuff on the Buses, of course, just witht the added clying sweat and airborne pathogens trapped in a small space factor.

I will gracefully bow out of this thread now...to each their own. In the blue corner - SMART FAST CHEAP. In the tinfoil hat corner - dodgy step towards a (tighter) Police State.

Happy trails.

Scrambled Password Bogus Email

13:12 / 02.11.05

Haha! BAck again!

Just out of interest, do you not buy things with a credit/bank card in shops out of the same principle?

No, and no - The principle is different, the answer the same.

No. I don't have a (personal) credit card. Shit things.

Tryphena Absent

14:07 / 02.11.05

Well I have a Tesco Clubcard and a Nectar card so all of my shopping details are already being catalogued. I think that being directly on a government database is a little different to being on a marketing database- I rather exaggerated my concerns for myself in all of those threads about ID cards. I don't actually care if they have my details, I'm a middle class white female, I'm more worried about everyone else. Primarily though I don't think the data you give for an Oystercard is really that revealing... your bank statement says far more about you.

No, to be honest I just think it's unavoidable to be traced. Ever been a member of a trade union? Then we can buy the list that has your name and address on it to mail things out to you. It's that simple to find people now. If your name is on any non-government list in the entire country with your address beside it than as part of a respectable organisation I can buy your details.

14:16 / 02.11.05

I travel up with a cheap ticket on the train. I can pay with cash and it includes bus and tube Zones 1-6 (and the cost is £1.90 more than an ordinary ticket - a fraction over one Zone 1 journey - I do two Zone 1 tubes as a minimum). I do have an Oyster Card which I use once a week (when I travel in early and can't get the cheap ticket).

According to a letter from someone at TfL in the Metro the other day, they remove the information after 8 weeks.

Perhaps we should start an Oyster Card pool for Pre Pay cards. You get one, use it for a little while, drain it down to zero, then send it in for a replacement with someone else's card. That would completely mess up any possible data tracking applications.

20:36 / 02.11.05

I consider myself pretty careful about giving out personally identifiable information - I think this has been reinforced by me ending up working in data mining, everybody else I know who does is the same - but Oyster cards really don't worry me.

For a start they're no worse than Travelcards used to be; you don't think that every time you put your Travelcard through the machine (possible several times before showing it to the bloke operating the barrier) that information wasn't being recorded? Secondly, until such time as they become ID-card linked (and if this happens I will certainly be getting anonymous weeklies, since I'm not getting an ID card) the information isn't really tied in with anything else, the infrastructure just isn't there. Routine access to your travel details for other purposes is very unlikely at this point in time. I would object to cash being completely phased out to pay for travel, for practical as well as identity-related reasons, but the current situation doesn't bother me.

I actually think loyalty cards are worse than Oysters any day, not because you're going to be tracked down by what you buy at Tesco (they don't give a toss about that, your data goes into a massive pool to be broken down by post code, demographics etc and then used for marketing) but because by participating I would be helping a group who I actively dislike make money, as well as contributing to the overall divisive process of breaking down society into discrete marketable blocs. That's probably something for another thread. But Oysters? If I was going to participate in any sort of clandestine activity I can think of dozens of ways I could avoid any risk from an Oyster. A bike would work, for a start.

20:36 / 03.11.05

Having left at 5.30, and arrived home at 9.00, essentially two hours late, you're presuming that I don't actively dislike London Transport.

That said, Oyster cards are becoming a lot less voluntary than store loyalty cards. You don't need a loyalty card to shop in Boots. But for many types of tickets, you will need an Oyster card.

21:11 / 03.11.05

No more than you've always needed a photocard for.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

06:32 / 04.11.05

Actually, you haven't needed a photocard for a weekly bus pass for years.