Comment by Gigachad
6 days ago
It’s actually even easier, your car has a plate on the front with a unique ID that a camera scans, often to automatically track your park time for ticketing.
I can’t really care about obscure Bluetooth tracking when every business has CCTV doing facial recognition.
Yeah exactly, with a car I would no longer be expecting any type of privacy, sadly.
Here in Holland we must even have a mobile phone module in every car so it can call the emergencies in case of a crash.
It’s all of the EU. It’s literally illegal to sell new cars without a radio transceiver in them.
But is it illegal to personally disable it?
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I'm in two minds about this. Yes, there are severe privacy implications.
But also this happened, just a couple of hour's drive from where I live, about ten years ago:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-tayside-central-33505...
and similar things have happened about once a year ever since. Now in the news article I linked to a huge part of the problem was that the police didn't follow it up correctly, went to where the accident had been reported rather than where it had occurred, didn't see anything, and then gave up.
But if the car had rung from where it had actually crashed then the incident would have EISEC[1] data tagged to it, which would have given them actual co-ordinates to hit.
[1] https://www.derbyshire.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/foi-media/der... (first hit on google)
Also, you can read the plate from much farther away than the TPMS sensors.
Even easier, electromagnetic radiation can be used to detect the presence and exact location and movements of not just automobiles, but also people! Many people have detectors for these things that can literally see through transparent material that makes up large sections of the walls of many houses and apartments.
A camera has quite a few failure modes (bad lighting, fog, dirty lens, obscured by plant growth, privacy laws, etc.) which a TPMS receiver & directional antenna don't.
The plate is pretty trivial to fake though. For one thing you can just remove it, but it's trivial to alter with just spray paint. Or using an outdated plate, or someone else's plate, etc. it's identifying sort of how an phone number is supposed to be identifying: nominal, but not secure and trivially abused for fraud
It's trivial if you're concealing your conceal your identity when committing a crime, but a huge pain in the ass and a crime itself if you just want to protect yourself from creeps tracking you.
> The plate is pretty trivial to fake though.
Sure it is, but people can't realistically think to randomize their plate numbers to avoid tracking... IANAL but is it probably a criminal offense to do so.
In Europe and the US all new vehicles now have a visible ID under their front window glass, it’s called a VIN. It’s even standardized where it must be.
I wonder what the first vehicle to have the VIN under the windshield was. I believe I saw that for the first time maybe 20 years ago (USA).
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Are there cameras that can actually read VINs on moving vehicles?
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Wait they use this for parking meters?! Which cities?
I think they’re pretty common.
Only reason I know is because I wondered if I could walk to the booth and press the button for a new parking ticket and pay for 5 minutes instead of 4 hours..
Here in Sweden it's uncommon. Especially in big parking lots/houses.