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License Plate Cameras Will Soon Track Phones, Wearables, Infotainment, and Even Your Pets (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/privacy@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/48289957

Defense contractor Leonardo is promoting a new technology called SignalTrace that will package plate cameras with sensors that can scrape unique identifiers tied to your smart devices and make that data available to law enforcement.

Police, border security, and other government agencies already comprise Leonardo’s customer base, and with this technology, those clients seek to correlate footage from these cameras to phones, tablets, wearables, AirTags, and, naturally, the electronics inside cars themselves.

If SignalTrace can pick up your Bluetooth headphones, you can be sure it’ll also be looking out for your vehicle’s 5G hotspot, infotainment system, and even its tire pressure monitoring sensors. The company includes pet microchips as a potential entry point to tracking.

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[–] 13 points 3 months ago* (11 children)

Late last year a city I have to drive through was bragging they had deployed systems to ID cars based on their TPMS sensors. I made a comment on lemmy some time later mentioning this, and also talked about how I had removed those sensors from my vehicle.

I was immediately inundated with comments that more or less said "That's too hard to do and requires special tools, also your car will certainly kill you once you take them out due to three tires having 36 psi and one tire having 35 psi, and it won't work anyway because your car's 5g connection and your phone so it's a stupid idea and you should definitely not do it because you'd be a moron for doing so."

The fact that I was hit by so many comments that basically said the same thing so quickly, tells me I was correct for removing them. I wonder where those "people" are now?

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  • [–] 5 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Those problems the users brought to your attention are accurate and still exist, though. Now there's just additional problems.

    Unless you're obscuring your license plate as you drive, they still don't need this tech to track your movements and will continue to do so by camera, alone, and you've still degraded your driving experience. I'm not sure what you think was "solved" by removing your TPMS sensors, since they're still tracking you just the same.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (1 child)

    Hey look, another one!

    There is no reason to make it easier for them, is it?

    What part of my "driving experience" was degraded? You realize tire pressure gauges exist, right?

    I won't discuss other options for the issues you mentioned, because you're repeating the same words as some pretty obvious bots.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (5 children)

    Lol

    Antennas are too hard to deploy? It's just a radio signal. Most hackers could build a tool to record tpms sensors that pass their house.

    Are there other ways to track you, yea. But those of us that drive and keep old cars running don't have 5g and tpms. If I leave my phone at home, the only radio signal my car puts out is the Bluetooth from the aftermarket radio I installed. I could swap that back and they'd have to use cameras to track my car.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

    Oh no, I wasn't clear - they said removing the TPM sensors themselves required specialized equipment. Which I suppose is technically true, but it was the work of an hour and a harbor freight manual tire changer. So it "requires" equipment any stoned hillbilly either owns themselves or is owned by someone they know. Or they could just have a tire shop do it.

    The car I drive is modern-ish, from the last decade, but it is a really, really basic car. It doesn't even shift it's own gears. The instrument cluster and center console don't even have screens in them. There is certainly not any 5G antenna, as the car predates the commercial 5G rollout.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Oh yea. It's just replacing a valve stem. I guess the computer might bitch some if it doesn't have any, but electrical tape fixes that light.

    I guess balancing the tire after would be the hardest part.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I didn't even have to balance the tire. I only broke the bead on one side, and pushed the tire sidewall back enough to get my hand in there and pull the sensors out. They are very lightweight and didn't throw the balance off that I could notice.

    I do have a persistent TPMS warning light, but some work with a screwdriver had the bulb out. My truck was different, it has a warning light and a warning message on the cluster LCD screen, but with Forscan I was able to just disable the TPMS function.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago* (1 child)

    I did not know tpms used radios for local comm. I would thought they'd used a type of rotary union like you see on semis with auto inflate tires.

    Leave it to manufacturers to find the cheapest solution thats worse for everyone.

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