Regards,
“The issue is that the feature...” exists at all in the first place!
Soon it will be Mandatory for all peasants to be tracked at all times.
Click bait.
Sure, if you have a person’s credit card information, you can see what stations they enter, and can make some deductions based on that (Jimmy lives near Nostrand Avenue and comes home at Fulton Street). That’s hardly “tracking”, and to do that, they’d have to pull out the same card each time over a period of time, and save no money on the fare since they’re not using the OMNY program to save money. If this person is a regular commuter, they’re not giving the MTA a cent more than they’re entitled to, and if they have half a brain they’re more concerned with the system leaking their card info so they’re buying a MetroCard from the machine in the station with cash or a credit card... at least those machines you’d have to physically compromise to get card numbers.
It’s not a well-designed feature to let you get meta about a person (they should ask for CVV or the billing zip code or something else besides the card number and expiration date) but that would require real engineers instead of the cadre of vendors that regularly fleece the taxpayers through the MTA.
OMNY is the brainchild of Cubic, the company that developed the MetroCard for NYC and other transit systems’ payment tech. The machines in the stations ran Windows NT well past its expiration date (and the MTA, via Cubic, paid for extended support). Expecting anything well-thought out from these leeches is fantasy.
They? There was more than one?
Regards,