Talkin' Transit

Talkin’ Transit: Institutional

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‘good morning’
courtesy of ‘volcanojw’

Last week we told you about Metro’s board having voted to give preliminary approval to change their privacy policy in order to be able to provide SmarTrip data to users over the internet. The press release outlining what was to happen later this year set off my “I-can’t-believe-we’re-having-this-conversation” alarms.

In that release, Metro points out two things that set me off. First, there’s the reason for the change. It seems that after SmarTrip was introduced in 2004, the board approved a privacy policy in 2005 that seems not have considered the possibility that people would want access to their data over the internet.

Let me repeat that: five years ago, almost 15 years after the world wide web was invented and a decade after “information superhighway” entered the general lexicon, Metro’s board didn’t consider the internet when making their plans. Add to that having to have the board act in order to change the privacy policy because, it seems, the policy is written so narrowly that delivering the same data online and offline requires a change.
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