this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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During all this monitoring, I wasn’t anywhere near the rider. I didn’t even need to see them with my own eyes. Instead, I was sitting inside an apartment, following their movements through a feature on a Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) website, which runs the New York City subway system.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (2 children)

With their consent, I had entered the rider’s credit card information—data that is often easy to buy from criminal marketplaces, or which might be trivial for an abusive partner to obtain—and punched that into the MTA site for OMNY, the subway’s contactless payments system. After a few seconds, the site churned out the rider’s travel history for the past 7 days, no other verification required.

From the article

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Credit cards are as secure as carrying your passwords around you on a piece of paper, and telling it loots of people always.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Thank you! I was on the bus and couldn't get the article to load

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

From the article, you can get a detailed usage history of MTA transactions by simply supplying the credit card number (which they state can very often be bought on the dark web). The lack of identity confirmation to pull the report is the concern.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

You want to force people to show ID to use the subway?

Why is this info even public? That's the real issue.

[–] hatchet 5 points 1 year ago

Credit card info -> see timestamped transit transacting history, including station name (location)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Are we playing Jeopardy?