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this post was submitted on 16 Nov 2025
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Privacy
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Buy a train ticket with cash? Not guaranteed to be fully "private" in the cyberpunk shithole we live in but presumably more private than a car.
On that note, fuck every transit agency (including TransLink in Vancouver) who make it more expensive to buy tickets with cash compared to a transit card. And especially fuck you if your transit card system is a P3 with the data handled by a private company (again, including TransLink). You're probably paying the money they thought they could have made selling your commute data to advertisers.
Bonus non privacy related rant: TransLink, the Earth and our decedents also say fuck you for using plastic RFID cards even for single journey tickets that will get promptly thrown in the trash when they expire in 90 minutes instead of a simple piece of paper that can biodegrade. They even waste more resources to wrap the plastic in paper to give the illusion of the ticket being made of paper when it absolutely is not. Yeah make single use microcomputers and antennas why don't you? Can't have transit being too eco friendly after all. They're not futuristic, future generations will curse us for being so barbarically wasteful of precious resources while digging those RFID tickets out of landfills to extract silicon and metal from. Just print QR codes on normal paper tickets for god sake since the RFID cards probably only store a single unique ID that needs to be looked up against a database anyway, or better yet, just have coin slots on the fare gates and skip giving you a ticket altogether. Oh wait, but then they wouldn't able to know which station you get off at and refuse to let you out until you've paid the upcharge for having the audacity to ride a fully automated train system even one station outside your home city.
Train stations have hella cameras
So do roads, and your metal cage literally has a code on a plaque tied directly to your government ID, with a retroreflective background and each character carefully engineered to be machine readable from any angle and lighting. Hell, a good number of the cars you pass have 360 degree camera arrays pointed directly in your windows, or if you spring for a higher end model with all the features, you get the privilege of a camera pointed straight at your face and at your passengers' faces.
Also, you can cover your face on transit with a medical mask (unless you're in the US where apparently it's a felony in a lot of states). If you try covering your license plate in any country you'll literally get arrested.
As scary & intrusive as all of that sounds, I'm still only worried they'll spy me picking my nose while driving.
I mean, compared to what? Picking your nose on transit? The people sitting across from you is probably a bigger issue than the cameras in that case. IMO if you're okay with being spied on in your car you really don't have much more to worry about on a train or in a station.
Also, if we're talking only the transit or road system and not the spying at your destination, driving gives much more granular location data than transit. They'll know which house or building you pulled up to compared to which train station or bus stop you get off at.
I guess I'm just enjoying this 2018 Mercedes I bought new off the lot in cash that was the last of its kind to have no big brother tech in it.