Technology

I’m tired, boss.

Your car has a series of numbers and letters on the back of it that are unique to the vehicle, and can be used to track you as well. There are even automated cameras that can do this.

Tracking a vehicle is easy, and always has been.

Your license plate can also be used to track you

A local city proudly mentioned on the news that they had a system that could track TPMS sensors. Pretty much all cars after 2008 uses TPMS sensors that each broadcast a unique identifier to the car. They aren't hard to remove, and you can buy valve stems that fit your car (0.452 hole) at any auto parts store.

EDIT: The sheer amount of replies to this post days later that basically state "This is too hard to do, and it won't work anyway, so you are stupid to try and shouldn't do it", all from people who clearly have no real idea how the TPMS system on a car works, have confirmed for me that I was correct in spending a half hour removing these devices.

Dude, my car has GPS and a 4G internet connection as well as my android phone and my work required iPhone ... In a world like this, Tyre sensors are probably not required to track me.

among the hundreds of other things that "could be tracking me"

at this point I wouldn't be surprised if my inner most thoughts weren't already uploaded to some giant government server.

License Plates, Vin Numbers clearly available on the dash, Tire Sensors, Bluetooth MAC, WIFI MAC, Cellular IDs for most even if you don't pay for the service.

It's an interesting thing to point out, but we're mostly driving around with much higher power sensors than the pressure sensors.

They discovered a thing that everyone's known forever. Here's Bruce Schneier in 2008

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/tracking_vehicl.html

Because each sensor broadcasts a fixed unique ID, the same car can be recognized repeatedly without reading a license plate. This makes TPMS-based tracking cheaper, harder to detect, and more difficult to avoid than camera-based surveillance, and therefore a stronger privacy threat.

This seems like a real stretch.

Cameras and automated license plate recognition are absurdly cheap at this point. And cameras have much greater range and reliability than whatever wireless signal interception this is, which the researchers have said is effective up to 50 meters.

Meanwhile, from the office where I sit (which happens to be more than 50 meters above street level), I can see a highway and read the license plates of all the cars maybe 100-300m away. Plug in a cheap phone as a simple webcam and I can probably log all the license plates that drive by, maybe even correlate that to makes and models of vehicles for redundancy.

And who's going to detect that I've got a cell phone camera pointed out of my office window, or that I'm running that type of image recognition on the phone?

Jokes on them, those tire pressure sensors are the first thing I don't replace. I just visually check my tires and put a pressure gauge on them if they look suspect.

All these "unintentional" tracking devices begin to look intentional.

Flock in a few months: “introducing a license plate reader that doesn’t need to see the license plate. The magnet leaf you got on Amazon to get through red light cameras won’t be enough to fool our dystopian surveillance system anymore”

Yeah, I dont have any, nice try

Wait till you see how many Bluetooth devices still do this. Or better yet, Ant+.

Jokes on them. My TPMS sensors died a while ago, and I haven't felt the need to fix it.

Now I'm a ghost! /s

TIL that these sensors transmitted via a wireless signal rather than being hardwired. I've never heard of them needing to be replaced due to dead batteries.

Theres a spy device in your pocket.

I mean- anything that communicates wirelessly could be used to track an owner/user of a thing.. Is it likely? No, but is it possible someone puts radios under the pavement at intersections to log TPMS sensors? Sure- fuck now I'm messing with my own head. Never mind.

Eh, the fucking cellular modems in my car that stream the camera data for training can be used to track me. Hell, the anti theft tracker that I paid money for can be used to track me.