You have to renew your driver’s license every 10 years. That means in the worst case scenario, the image they’re using of you could be 10 years out of date.
Those images are also not detailed enough to be used for facial recognition. Sure, it could help narrow down the list of suspected people, but they’re crazy if they think they’d be able to pinpoint someone based on what they looked like 5-10 years prior.
I suspect these powers are being used for something else more sinister. Immigration, for example, to clamp down on people who have licenses and are delivery drivers, or taxi drivers for example.
It’s not the kind of search where they need to be very precise; certainly not pinpoint accuracy. t’s just another tool to narrow their searches that rely on other details.
And if you’re a fully grown adult, not undergoing radical facial reconstruction, it seems unlikely to be that the relative distances and orientations of your eyes, nose, and mouth are going to change very much. My driver’s license photo is at least a decade old and even though my face looks different on the surface due to age, changes in weight, and changes in hair color and length I’d bet my key features are still in relatively the same places.
Of course they could also be using this for more sinister purposes. No argument there.
Making it free just for residents is an interesting choice. I guess the argument is that they’re paying taxes to cover the use while non residents are, but then you have to maintain all of the ticketing infrastructure for much lower revenue. They’ve also banned taking bikes on the trams as part of this, which isn’t great.
I don’t like the idea of requiring folks have chips on them & needing bank accounts to access transport. Worse if a for-profit payment processor gets to skim a little off on every transaction.
All of these devices emit traceable signals. If someone doesn’t want to be tracked, which there are tools that do this, folks should have the option to opt out as paper & coins have worked fine for a millennia. But also what you are now proposing is that Google & Apple, two ad companies, get to take a piece of the pie for doing nothing and collecting that user data of what user is going where/when.
Bruh, those payment methods are ubiquitous in developed countries, like those in Europe.
the advantage of credit/debit cards is that you don’t need to fucking buy some obscure city specific card for public transport or need to figure out the tickets, you just tap your card when you get on.
I live in Asia & I’m real happy cash is preferred for everywhere. It’s not some tech startup or credit card’s business how/when I’m spending my money & it’s never been difficult to hand currency to the driver.
Then I guess you’ve never met the most populated continent that seems to be alright as is.
But also we could have free transit before the internet. Wrapping something in technology doesn’t mean its better. A smart watch doesn’t tell you the time any better than are without Bluetooth.
It’s not too make money but they still need money to run it, and in a lot of places a significant portion of that comes from fares. If they’re replacing all of it with money coming from elsewhere then great.
That’s why in well designed systems, the price is different at rush hour, and for high traffic routes and times.
Introducing something variable or unpredictable into public transit would probably deter a few people from using it
From an efficiency perspective this makes sense, but I don’t like it to be honest. The long distance trains do that here and it’s very off putting, although I can understand why - the trains are already usually very overcrowded, long and don’t fit in most stations, no funding is available to extend the platforms any further, and companies can’t buy newer, denser, faster trains because the railway electrify project is decades late…
As an alternative I’d propose increasing the frequency of the trams if possible, or maybe even use longer trams during those times if the stops are suitably long
Great news everyone! Hopefully the system works well and other cities will follow suit. I know in the USA (in the few places we do have public transit) the argument for keeping fares is always 1.we don’t want to pay taxes for that and 2.if we charge that’ll keep the vagrants from using it. Two arguments that make no sense at all, 1. We already pay taxes for the public transit, why pay more to actually use it? And 2.anyone who has used public transit knows the fare doesn’t keep vagrants out.
In the short term, there’s also a lack of capacity. Fares function as a limiter on the number of people using it. Too many people for your capacity? Raise prices. Spare capacity? Lower prices.
This can be solved by increasing capacity, but it takes time to figure out what the capacity necessary actually is and then buying more trains/buses and hiring/training drivers.
My home city of Riga tried to do that after success in Tallinn. The mayor thought of releasing special Riga cards to residents. The issue was that many people come to Riga for work from other cities, towns and villages and they got angry to pay for transport. So mayor said to declare themselves in Riga instead of their home towns. That caused an uproar from town councils as that meant that they will lose all the tax income and won’t be able to provide local services. And Riga is already home to a third of the country’s population, so town budgets are overstretched.
In the end the government had to step in and ban the whole thing. The end.
para-government tech companies are working as hard on that as possible, it will be soon. It doesn’t even matter if it really works, they’ll just say it does.
We protected our borders long before these surveillance technologies existed. We should keep doing it without, because it’s just a matter of time that what is normalized for travellers is normalized for us.
The UK just had a big article revealing that their Prevent database was being shared with border control (edit: link). The Prevent database covers people who have not committed any crime but have shown some indication of potentially becoming radicalised towards terrorirsm or towards some other crime. The vast majority are labelled “no further action” but still have been shared with customs. Some were children as young as 6 and 4.
You absolutely don’t need to do anything wrong to get on a list. Hell, just browsing the internet gets you put on all sorts of lists.
Wow, I like the one guy farther down who claims Likud is awful but it's Hamas propaganda that the IDF kills kids.... like the massive dead civilian and kid numbers are just all propaganda to make a genocidal ethnistate look bad.
Just makes me wonder how many Palestinians they’ve murdered in similar circumstances, and we just didn’t hear about it because they weren’t Israelis, so it was treated as if it didn’t matter.
I mean, the answer is loads. There was a hospital where they had to move all patients away from the outer rooms because the Israeli army were using snipers to pick off staff who came to attend to them. Uniformed doctors who were engaged in treating their patients were shot with no warning.
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