Oyster is just as anonymous as a ticket

How many of you guys are Londoners? We already have "anonymity" with Oyster.

Go to a ticket office, proffer a £10 banknote, get an Oystercard loaded with £7 of travel (£3
deposit for the card). You are as anonymous as you are buying anything else for cash.

You can recharge the card with more value as many or as few times as you wish to. Each time,
using cash, at a machine. The system can track the card, but there is no mechanism to say who
is using it. Indeed, the pay-as-you-go cards are explicitly legally transferrable. 

Certainly, you may, if you wish, later register the card in your personal name. That has the
advantage that if you lose it, you can phone Oyster and reclaim all un-used credit loaded on
the registered card. But that is voluntary. You may, if you prefer, leave it unregistered.
Then it's like a bank-note: your loss is someone else's gain. 

Obviously if you are travelling with criminal intent or if your journey might cause you
embarassment if traced, you'll want a paper ticket, or will use your new Oystercard for one
journey only. You'll leave your everyday registered card at home with any other ID that might
get yourself traced. If you're as thick as the murderer who used his victim's registered
Oystercard to get home, you deserve what happens next!

If the authorities ever stop selling anonymous Oystercards (and  the more expensive
one-journey paper tickets), we should worry. But for now, it's just a high-tech multi-hop
ticket that allows you any future choice of route rather than having to pre-book it.

As for its RFID aspect, the Oyster readers have a range of a few centimeters. I don't know if
someone could read your "tag" from a greater distance, but if it bothers you, I'd suggest a
tinfoil-lined wallet.

There are a lot of big-brotherly things going on that we should oppose, but Oyster doesn't
appear to me to be one of them.