Now Some Beijingers Can Swipe Phones to Board Subways, Buses, Etc.

image via beijingholiday.com

For some Beijingers, the blue yikatong public transit cards — which you can use to get on subways, public buses, and even pay the occasional (ok, very rare) cabbie — may soon be a thing of the past. The Beijing Times is reporting that the company that makes those cards (Beijing Municipal Government Yikatong Ltd.) is already rolling out cell phone support — with a catch.

The catch is that the service only works if you put a Beijing Yikatong memory card into your phone. The upside of this is that the service works already, presumably because the tech in the phone memory card is the same that’s in the regular blue yikatong cards. But of course, not all phones have a space for external memory cards. There’s also an app connected to the cards, and it wasn’t immediately clear what OSes that app would be available for, or whether or not users needed to install the app — which will allow you to play games and recharge your balance via the internet — to be able to use the memory card.

Another potential downside is that the Yikatong folks aren’t known to be masters of privacy-protection. Last month it was discovered that the company was publishing all of everyone’s movements publicly on its website — ostensibly as a service for customers — and that anyone with someone else’s card number could use the number to look up a public record of every single place they’d ever swiped their yikatong card, including specific dates and times. Given that, I for one would be a little nervous giving these guys potential access to the much more sensitive information that’s contained within my phone.

The Beijing Times article is woefully short on specifics, so we’re trying to get in touch with Yikatong for some clarification — if we hear back, we’ll update this article — but in the meantime, I think it’s pretty safe to say that iPhone users are probably out in the cold here, since no model of iPhone features a memory card slot. The same goes for more or less all other models of phone that don’t have built-in memory card slots.

I guess that means I’m still stuck using my same-old blue card to take the subway every day, but some lucky smartphone users can apparently start swiping their phones and recharging their balance online today, so if you’ve got a phone with a memory card slot (and you don’t need to use the slot for something else), you might want to try to get your hands on one of Yikatong’s new cards. (Or, you might want to wait until someone’s checked it first to be sure there aren’t any gaping security holes).

[Beijing Times via Sina Tech]