alien pimp
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more than cunting bus drivers, i hate the fact that without my oyster i have to pay 2 quid, but with it, its 1.20. how fucking stupid. sometimes you dont have enough on your card and the nearest top up place is miles away. why should i have to pay 80p more as a result? cunting boris.
It's a reward for providing all that lovely personalised data about your movements.
Which Big Brother is no doubt storing on a database somewhere for some unspeakably nefarious purpose...
This is correct. Before the introduction of Oyster cards buses hardly ever moved and when they did they were unable to go up hills due to the vast amounts of change being carried.Seriously though, surely it's just to make the whole thing quicker for passengers and drivers alike? Think about how busy some routes are - if everyone paid in cash the bus would never get anywhere and the driver would have to carry about a grand in change, it'd be ridiculous. Having said that I used to like the old Routemasters with their conductors.
I don't know why anyone in government would want to track your movements but if they did then looking up your Oyster card would be a pretty good way. The system seems to work quite well actually.but really, how can you read anything sinister into an automated ticket system for riding buses and trains? You're on camera the moment you step outside your front door, for heaven's sake. Anyone sufficiently high up in government who wanted to track my day-to-day movements could easily do so via CCTV, satellite and mobile signals. Not that this is itself a Good Thing, but it makes worrying about any sinister implications of Oyster cards a bit redundant, don't you think?
Edit: any case, time and again the government has proven that when it comes to big central IT projects, it can't find its arse with both hands. At least the last government was like that, and I see no reason the current one should be any different, especially with all the cutzzz.
Supermarkets are keen for you to register a 'reward' card so they can target you with ads for stuff that your recorded purchasing habits suggest you might be susceptible to being sold. And yes, they can sod off with that.You're one of those guys who won't get a supermarket loyalty card because you think J. Sainsbury is passing on info about your favoured brand of baked beans to the Pentagon, aren't you?
what do you mean by 'real use'? It's quite easy to use that data, as you say marketers do it all the time.And as for the oyster being used to track individuals... I've worked in the civil service and there is a huge amount of personal data that exists but on various different databases that aren't linked in any way, and not really organised at all (certainly not centrally), and not cross-referenced either. It would take ridiculous amounts of effort and money to put such personal data to any real use.
All that's needed for the purposes of planning services, or stocking shelves, is the figures.The only thing I can think it being used for is to see what buses are busy and at what times to increase or decrease service.