Advocates of privacy better not ride the peanut-oil-smelling rails or the over-graffitied busses of the Société de transport de Montréal come this spring. The corporation plans on implementing a new smart card technology that, according to their disseminated literature, will “facilitate payment” and “cut down on fraud,” but The Link knows what they’re really up to...

The administrators of the STM are feverishly spending their days and nights sitting in their ivory tower planning ways in which to track us, plain and simple. For now, they have settled for a new system of user cards, but what next? Guard dogs and ankle bracelets? The cards of the future are out to get us—maybe.

Currently, the metro and bus cards we are given have a magnetic strip and must be read through slots on the turnstiles for access. Come spring, the STM will force us to use their new contactless smart cards, which only need to be waived over a specified area with built-in hardware to read the information. These new cards use radio frequency technology to transit the information. This brings up several scary concerns… What kind of information will be stored on the cards and how personal can it get?

One day will we be required to submit our address, bathing habits or even pets’ names? This type of information is left up to the discretion of the STM and they force their workers to sit in tiny glass cubicles all day…

Another more serious concern is the facility of the non-STM citizen to read these cards using their own readers. Therein lies a concern about what sort of measures the STM is implementing towards protecting that information (regardless of how important it is) against theft and tampering.

A potential facet of this upgrade is the fact that RFID, or radio frequency identification, tags can be easily tracked with the proper equipment. The STM can potentially track all movement at all times for any number of purposes. Even though this can be used in good ways, such as quickly finding a fugitive within the metro system, privacy concerns still remain on the horizon. What if you’re mistaken for a fugitive? It has happened all too many times for these two journalists, with mixed results.

Do we really want the STM to be able to single us out at all times for no other reason than the simple fact that they can? Only time will tell.

But, children, is this just the tip of the iceberg for privacy concerns? This should be of utmost importance when considering the societal direction we are moving towards. Technology like this has been used in other cities and countries (Milan, Italy and Finland are two examples) to varying degrees of success—Finland has actually outlawed the collection of certain types of personal information in an effort to protect citizens from theft problems that arise when information is saved onto these cards. Will our governments be as prudent?

Are we going to end up in this universe full of RFID tags floating around our body, forcing us to point and thrust various body parts in order to gain access to public transportation? This is only a mere musing, but sadly could one day become reality if we are not careful about who we let gather what information.

We should explore how we can best protect ourselves in the face of the Age of Public Everything before it’s too late. But even scarier is the idea that perhaps that age has already arrived?