What are they going to know that they don't know anyway?
Right now I can get a 10 trip ticket for cash. No one knows I bought it, no one knows when or where I travel on it. And it cannot be read by a nearby reader without my knowing.
Potentially a Snapper card could be used to monitor your travel habits, and tie them to you.
(Since it works by RFID, other readers than official Snapper readers could be discreetly sniffing for cards too, but that's not really a worry for now).
This sets the scene for Big-Brother style monitoring of movement. And it's not just the thing itself that bugs me. See, now you might say "how's this worse than a monthly pass - it's almost the same" and then some more intrusive thing will come along and people will say "well, it's not much worse than Snapper" and then in a few years we'll be habituated to having people we don't know capturing our movement around town with few if any guarantees about what they'll do with that data.
There's no NEED for cards to be tied to a person's identity - it's completely gratuitous. It doesn't bring any benefit worth having to me and it is ripe for abuse.
What are they going to know that they don't know anyway?
Right now I can get a 10 trip ticket for cash. No one knows I bought it, no one knows when or where I travel on it. And it cannot be read by a nearby reader without my knowing.
Potentially a Snapper card could be used to monitor your travel habits, and tie them to you.
(Since it works by RFID, other readers than official Snapper readers could be discreetly sniffing for cards too, but that's not really a worry for now).
This sets the scene for Big-Brother style monitoring of movement. And it's not just the thing itself that bugs me. See, now you might say "how's this worse than a monthly pass - it's almost the same" and then some more intrusive thing will come along and people will say "well, it's not much worse than Snapper" and then in a few years we'll be habituated to having people we don't know capturing our movement around town with few if any guarantees about what they'll do with that data.
There's no NEED for cards to be tied to a person's identity - it's completely gratuitous. It doesn't bring any benefit worth having to me and it is ripe for abuse.