if you don’t remember my posts, you may recognize this picture?

I live in Mainz and contacted the public transportation authority which informed that my employer chose an option where no chip cards are being produced for the end user.

As this PTA has a deal of some kind with a company named “ride” I also contacted them asking for solutions for people who don’t own a smartphone or refuse to share their data with google (I already see them laughing). The only email option they offer is SALES support, not technical support.

I also tried to find a pkpass changing the browser’s user agent to an apple product and logging in to my account with ride but no, that google wallet icon still appears, still directing me to google’s sign up page, no pkpass file whatsoever.

Ideas?

thank you for taking the time to answer in English, as my German is way too broken.

  • Elvith Ma'for@feddit.org
    7·
    19 days ago

    So far, I’ve seen mixed results with using other apps besides Google Wallet.

    “Back in my day”, you’d just get send a pkpass file by mail or get a link to a pkpass file and you were done. Nowadays, you usually find those “add to Google wallet” links, which send you to Google, so that they can insert that file serverside into you account and the Google wallet app just displays them, after downloading them from you account.

    I haven’t really looked into that, but maybe take a closer look at that link? Somehow, Google need to get the data to display in the app, so it’s probably either

    1. The PTA sends all data for those passes preemptively to Google, whether you use it or not and only sends google an ID to that pass (that’d be a GDPR nightmare, but then, we’re talking big tech…)
    2. The PTA is registered with google and that link only tells google to ask their server for that data using an ID that is passed in that URL (proprietary, but fine from a GDPR perspective)
    3. The link either contains all data necessary for that pass (unlikely - can contain images etc) or just contains an (encoded) link a pkpass file

    In the third option, you might be able to download that pkpass yourself or craft your own file? Check every parameter and - if it looks like random combination of letters and numbers, try to decode them using base64-web (not standard Base64!)