Taking the Myki

David Heath
Sunday, 02 March 2008 09:27

Your IT - Home IT

The Transport Ticketing Authority (TTA) has published a wonderful “Privacy Management Plan and Policy” which essentially gives them permission to do just about anything they want with whatever ‘private’ information they collect.  But it’s OK – they have a privacy policy!

Here are a few scenarios that warrant closer attention.

When a public transport user purchases a Miki, they have the option of ‘personalising’ the card, which essentially allows a couple of things.  Firstly, the card is linked to your identity for the stated purpose of allowing a lost or stolen card to be cancelled and the stored value transferred to a new card.  If you lose your non-personalised stored-value card, good luck! The new holder of the card gets to keep it all.  Secondly, you can imprint a photo (maybe yourself or your dog!) on the card.

All this is optional.  EXCEPT if the traveller is a concession-card holder – then it is mandatory to have a personalised card with the photo of the holder.  At the very least this is discriminatory as the holder is denied any kind of privacy in their use of public transport.

Although lip service is paid to anonymity, in practice it will be near-enough to impossible to be anonymous on the new system.  Of course a traveller can have a non-personalised card, but there is no easy way to add value to it without being irrevocably connected to the card.  And once connected to the card, your every journey can be linked to you.

That’s the major problem.  TTA have said that journey data will be retained for some period of time to ensure optimal charging.  However, reports from around the world have frequently demonstrated that such data is available under court order.  For instance why exactly DID you take a tram to that outer suburb when you claimed to be in the office all day?

There will be no such thing as a “cash fare.”  In other words, you can’t expect to jump on a tram or bus without a pre-purchased Myki.  In fact, there appears to be no way at all to step out of your door as a person newly arrived in Melbourne and legally board a passing tram or bus.  Fabulous, there goes the tourist trade!  More generally, there will be regular occurrences of people forgetting their wallets – they may-well have a few coins in their pocket, but clearly those will be useless!  Silly me – I still thought cash was legal tender in this state; apparently not!

Does the system actually alert the traveller when their card has been successfully scanned?  It’s highly possible that a person could travel all over town without realising their card is no longer in their wallet, until an inspector demands to check their Myki!

So, how simple is the system to rort?