PRIVACY
This section is called Privacy - but there's not much left of that these days. Check out a recent story on the BBC.
Whether you're using your mobile, credit card or car, you can be tracked easily and your general location known. This is the price we pay for the convenience of paying electronically, whether it be at a road toll, railway barrier, etc.
MOBILES
Your mobile handset communicates with the service provider's transceivers but each mast usually has a number of uniquely identifiable antennae. The orientation of these will be known and you only need to be communicating with a single antenna for the network to broadly identify your general bearing from the mast. If your handset is communicating with two or more antennae, then your approximate location is known. Science fiction? No! Service providers already sell this service as LBS (Location Based Services). You can subscribe to services that tell you where your children are and the more accurate GPS service is used to track vehicles, trains, valuable shipments and so on.
YOUR CAR
So you thought you might be safe in your car? Apart from the obvious street cameras, ANPR systems and road tolls, that know exactly where you are at a particular time, you can also be tracked using the traffic flow cameras. These are not speed cameras as such, but record your location at a particular time and then at a different location sometime later. The system calculates your average speed to assess traffic flow for services such as Trafficmaster, etc. However, the software as designed was supposed to store only the first and last parts of your registration number and omit the middle two charcaters, this being unique enough to track your location without knowing who you are. However, informed sources say that it actually records the whole registration number and so you're tracked.
CREDIT CARDS
Credit card companies (you can include debit cards and store cards too) have sophisticated systems to monitor and assess your purchasing habits. From personal experience, I have had my card stopped on more than one occasion for a suspicious purchasing pattern. When I asked what it was, the company said they couldn't divulge what was suspicious but that it could have been a fairly normal usage pattern as that is what a card thief would try to emulate - great!
Also, did you know that your card may very well be stopped if you exceed as few as 10 transactions per day? The 10 includes the second cardholder's transactions, so that's only 10 between you per day.
SMS MESSAGES
So you thought that your SMS messages were private? Think again! When the SFO visited our offices recently, someone offered to collect together mobile handsets so that evidence from sent and received text messages could be obtained. The SFO said, "Thank you but no, we can already gain access to that information" - and so they do, using direct connections into the mobile providers. They may need to have a court order, but if it's available to the SFO, it's probably available to the service provider's staff too.
TRANSPORT FOR LONDON OYSTER CARD
If you have an Oyster card then you probably chose it because it is cheaper and quicker than queuing to buy conventional tickets. Having an Oyster card also benefits TfL because they can reduce staffing levels in ticket offices at stations and, of course, the stored credit is in their bank account and not yours. Using your Oyster card also pinpoints your location each time you swipe it at the barrier or top it up at a ticket machine.
Oyster cards haven't been without their problems. Around 65,000 cards were corrupted and stopped working in July 2008 and had to be replaced. Later in the same month there was a further failure and gates to all London Underground stations were left open after Oyster pay-as-you-go customers were again charged the maximum fare for their journeys.