Here’s a completely unrelated question that matches the topic: Can you recharge an EasyCard at a convenience store? If so, do you need to use the special machine (Famiport or whatever) or do they do it at the till?
Do it at the till. Give them your card, plus the cash you wish to put in the card (say “Wo yao jia zhe i (or wu) bai”). The minimum, as usual is 100nt (this is true even at MRT stations).
Do it at the till. Give them your card, plus the cash you wish to put in the card (say “Wo yao jia zhe i (or wu) bai”). The minimum, as usual is 100nt (this is true even at MRT stations).[/quote]
Thank you so much!
I just learned something really cool. Only the last six transactions are visible to you by bumping the card on the right kind of reader, but EasyCard maintains transaction logs for each card for FIVE YEARS. Feel a private investigation coming on?
More down to earth, say you’re leaving Taiwan and you want your money back, or you’re so broke that you are going to stop riding the MRT in favor of walking everywhere, and you want those last couple hundred NT$ off your card to go buy some whiskey.
You can get the ENTIRE amount of the deposit back plus any remaining value (I’ve done this) if the card is undamaged, it’s got less than NT$3000 on it, and the card has been used five times or more and has been held for more than three months. (Note: here’s one of those “Taiwan doesn’t always follow the rules” moments… my cashed-in card met all of those criteria except the last one; I’d purchased it about a month earlier. They refunded it in full anyway.) If you buy one and then change your mind, within two days of purchase you can get all your money back, including the deposit, if the EasyCard has not been used, by returning it to one of the MRT customer service desks.
I had a feel the card contains a lot more transactions then six. Its good the card is anonymous because otherwise someone could track a lot of your movements over the last five years.
Eventually they may put a name to the card because it could be used for criminal investigation. Proof that you could have been at the scene of the crime (or at least your card).
Big Brother anyone?
You live in the land of CCTV and you’re worried about how they can track your movements using an EasyCard?
CCtv is a lot of different cameras by different entities. The easycard is one entity. A private D could track how many times you went to the porn shop? haha just kidding.
Im as pure as the driven snow so IM not worried. 
Should be 12 transactions if my calculation and the information given by the CCC presentation are correct. I checked with the mifare datasheet, and it doesn’t matter if EasyCard used Mifare Classic 1K or 4K, the sectors 3 to 5 always contain 4 blocks a 16 bytes…
Coming back to the OP’s question: So based on the information that the EasyCard company stores all transactions for 5 years, it is safe to assume that all transactions in busses are indeed dumped once in a while. Also JuliaZ’s MRT geek confirmed that the stuff is duped at the end of the day.
the chief, Is “someone on an internet forum heard from an MRT geek” enough to settle that disagreement with a (foreign) engineer friend of yours? Or need the forum geeks investigate more? 