Well if it doesn't actually top up when using buses it's no good to me. I was thinking of linking one to company credit card but seems would be a waste of time if that is indeed the case.
Well if it doesn't actually top up when using buses it's no good to me. I was thinking of linking one to company credit card but seems would be a waste of time if that is indeed the case.
No - it tops up just fine on buses and (I'm 90% sure) minibuses. I assume that Octopus and the AAVS card issuers have an agreement that they can process the credit card transaction when the vehicle next returns to base and that it will be honoured. This is not dissimilar to the agreements that many merchants have now where transactions under a certain value are processed without signature.
People seem to be making a big hoo-haa about something that is really very straightforward and just works. I can't imagine having an Octopus without auto-reload - it would be far less useful. I've been using it quite happily now for several years with absolutely no problems, including on one occasion when a card was lost.
Last edited by Gruntfuttock; 01-07-2012 at 01:41 AM.
I accept this as a more reasonable concern, although personally I think the utility outweighs the concern. And of course if you're spending money or going places that you don't want to be traceable you can always use another anonymous Octopus card or cash.
Of course most buses, MTRs and so on have cameras and videos are made of your presence there. So if the authorities want to trace you badly enough then they can do so.
Authorities yes, of course they can, I'm sure they have a dossier on most of us. Commercial companies (like Octopus) though, I have some power to withhold information about me from them, so they can't use me for their marketing.
This is interesting. I look at it the exact opposite way. I would like my privacy from government authorities as much as possible because they actually have coercive power over my actions (though little here in HK admittedly). I really don't care if private companies with whom I willingly do business are able to tailor their products more closely to my usage, or send me offers concerning the products I commonly purchase. If I don't like the products I can always stop buying them, and if I don't want the offers I can drop them in spam.
I take buses a lot and often trigger a recharge when getting onto a bus or minibus. Works fine. Could be the gubbins within the machine itself. There was a case, recently, of an MTR worker stealing 'spare' parts of Octopus recharge machines and building for himself a whole new value adding machine at home.
And to go back to the 'ease' of setting up AAVS thing and activating the card, well it just ticked me off royally as I had to time travel back to the 90s to find a fax machine, switch my whole routine to include more cash withdrawals and manual top-ups whilst I waited for the blasted letter to arrive (and this is very disruptive if you don't live or work near an ATM and are not in the habit of carrying or using cash), and as I don't often use the MTR I then had to make a special journey to hand in my letter in hand. And besides the inconvenience and disruption, the major annoyance was that this whole process was completely avoidable. If the tool on the other end of the phone had punched in the right set of commands to his or her (can't remember which) computer, then the AAVS could simply have been transferred from one card to another (as it was after the first theft).
And then to top it all off you have to reactivate your rewards and transfer over the rewards from your old card. For me that meant tracking down a Wellcome supermarket with a working points machine (there's no Wellcome where I live and the one near where I work didn't have a working machine), and then going back and forth on the phone for days with people at the Octopus Rewards office who either didn't know that points could be transferred at all or otherwise didn't know how to do it, all whilst the time limit for transferring points was slowly but surely ticking down.
Some buses do have a wireless connection, others don't and minibuses also don't as far as I know. The Taxi beta test in 2006 was cancelled because 8 out of 20 taxi drivers dropped out very quick because they just didn't want to return to base to upload the data.
It probably is an agreement between Octopus and the participating banks (only 22 as far as I know) that they honour the delayed transactions and Octopus probably also gets an update of which cards are no good anymore to disable the AAVS for them. Note that it's not just 'charge your Octopus with CC', it only works with participating banks so agreements and data exchange is probably in place.
There is a lot of info about the technology on the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_card#Technology
This all doesn't matter to us users I guess, unless somebody figures out a way how to trick the system and do a one-time charge with a disabled credit card during a timeframe when the Octopus system is vulnerable (which Octopus would probably deduct again next time you use your card on a networked or updated terminal).
The Octopus system hasn't been hacked as far as I know, but at Lo Wu they used multiple Octopus cards in a wallet to trick the turn styles (if the scanner detects multiple cards, it triggers a fail-safe mode and no money gets deducted from any of the cards). Indeed I have always wondered at Lo Wo (a long time ago I went through this madness every week) why there were so many errors and people would simply just continue, I always credited the chaos and sheer number of people running for the border when they exit the train.
So far I have not received spam from the Octopus company yet, but I always make sure to opt-out from everything when I sign up.
I have no doubt that they have a growing data set about my shopping behavior. 711, MTR, bus, McDonalds. It must look like 99% of the other people in Hong Kong.
One complaint I have is that you can't see a transaction history, except the last 10 transactions if you would buy one of these USB Octopus card readers. Having the transaction history available with merchant would make accounting and budgeting so much easier.
Last edited by 100LL; 01-07-2012 at 09:32 AM. Reason: Updated numbers
Tidbit: I saw a taxi in Central last week with the Octopus logo all over its exterior, presumably he accepts the 'dood'