MONTREAL – Don’t worry, Big Brother won’t be riding the bus, metro or train with you.
Public-transit authorities, which last month started allowing regular-fare users to register their Opus transit cards, say they have taken measures to maintain their customers’ privacy.
Users who take part in the voluntary-registration program can have their tickets or monthly passes replaced should their cards be lost, stolen or damaged.
To register, users must submit a form to the transit authority that includes his or her name, postal code and year of birth.
The card must be registered in person at which point the card is swiped to retrieve the unique number that identifies it.
The Societe de transport de Montreal keeps that data in a customer-information database that is accessible only to certain STM employees, all of whom are "bound by a confidentiality oath," Isabelle Trottier, the STM’s director of communications and customer service, said in an interview.
If STM employees "share this information and they’re caught, they can lose their jobs," Trottier said.
In a second, separate database, the STM tracks trips taken using individual Opus cards.
"Every time a card is used in a bus or metro station, it’s registered in a trip database," Trottier said. "We analyze the usage of every bus line, every metro station, to see how many people go in, at what time of the day, so we can see if our level of service is adequate" and make changes when necessary.
But even the data in that trip-information database cannot be traced back to individual cards, Trottier said.
That’s because the system essentially makes the card anonymous by assigning a different computer-generated number to each card.
Because of that, the trip information cannot be traced back to a user’s card, Trottier said.
As for outside hackers getting at the data, she said "there is a very high level of security for that system."
"It has never been hacked," she said. "The cards have never been hacked."
Martine Rouette, a spokesperson for the Agence metropolitaine de transport, said her agency, which operates commuter trains in the Montreal region, maintains its databases in the same way the STM does.
The AMT is also coordinating Opus registration for the Societe de transport de Laval and the Reseau de transport de Longueuil.
The STM’s Trottier said Opus registration is a feature users were eager to see.
"We were getting a lot of calls from people wanting to be able to do this" so they won’t lose tickets or passes if something happens to their cards, she said.
"It’s an attractive feature for the card."
In the first 10 days registration was available for regular-fare users at the STM, about 2,500 people signed up.
Students and seniors automatically register when they get their photo-ID Opus cards, which are required to pay reduced fares.
For more information on Opus-card registration, visit stm.info or amt.qc.ca.
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