Many electronic ticketing systems for public transportation have been deployed around the world. Using the example of Singapore's EZ-Link system we show that it is easy to invade a traveller's privacy and obtain his travel records in a real-world system. Then we propose encrypted bill processing of the travel records preventing any kind of privacy breach. Clear advantages of using bill processing instead of electronic cash are the possibility of privacy-preserving data mining analyses by the transportation company and monthly billing entailing a tighter customer relation and advanced tariffs. Moreover, we provide an implementation to demonstrate the feasibility of our solution.
Next generation systems for public transportation based on e-ticketing offer numerous advantages both for end users and providers of transportation service. At the same time, individuals using such systems tend to leave ubiquitous digital traces which raises serious concerns over privacy. This paper focuses on this issue and presents a framework for constructing privacy-preserving e-ticketing systems for public transportation. What differentiates our solution from other research contributions and real-world systems is that while being inherently privacy-preserving it (1) provides support for fine-granular billing (for registered customers) and (2) is based on loosely-coupled architecture (allows for local eticket validation). Our concept is additionally backed up by a practical evaluation of the most time-critical part of the system -handling of check-in/check-out events in the front-end.
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