I Tracked an NYC Subway Rider's Movements with an MTA ‘Feature’

mercano , 10 months ago

Other cities let you pay for transit directly via a credit card. Surely places like London have come up with a solution to this problem.

cbarrick , 10 months ago

NYC supports this too

HurlingDurling , 10 months ago

This should be shared to [email protected]

Ubermeisters , 10 months ago

Creep acts creepy and then writes article about how creepy it all was

Kbobabob , 10 months ago

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

Didn’t actually read it did you?

krayj , 10 months ago

This is a security flaw for sure, but it’s not nearly as serious as the article makes it out to be. You have to know the person you are targeting, you have to know which credit card they used to pay for their subway credits, and then you have to know the credit card number of that credit card. If you are in a position to know all that, then you are probably already in a position to stalk them using other/superior methods.

FuglyDuck , 10 months ago

there’s long lists of exactly that information available from purchase online. chances are your credit card company is the one selling it.

And most people don’t have dozens of cards, so they can just run their numbers through…

SatanicNotMessianic , 10 months ago

I think it’s exactly as big a deal as the article makes it out to be. Think of abusive partners. Transphobic parents. Waiters or bartenders who want to stalk the pretty girl they just checked out.

I know that the Apple credit card doesn’t have a number printed on it (iirc), and I think some of the payment systems essentially use a unique credit card number per purchase. I’m not sure if those kinds of things would help here.

But this is both dangerous and absolutely idiotic. Someone came up with an idea, so robe’s manager ram with it without talking to legal or security, and it got pushed live. It should absolutely be pulled.