On the Smart Card Data Privacy in Public Transport

Information technologies are becoming more widespread every year. Solutions based on data analysis are also developing in the urban transport management field. One of the most popular modern sources of personal mobility data is data from transport system validators. In our article, we present a method for finding the smart card identifier of a public transport system user at several spatio-temporal points based on data from validators. In the future, this identifier can be used by attackers to track the user. We analyze the influence of the number and nature of spatio-temporal points and the accuracy of timing on the success of the attack. We pay attention not only to the aspects of using such data for possible user tracking but also propose a system architecture for recovering lost travel documents based on our method.