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.
All these “unintentional” tracking devices begin to look intentional.
O no. And this whole time I’ve been mailing my phone to my destination every time I have to drive somewhere so they can’t track me!
The bastards!
Wait till you see how many Bluetooth devices still do this. Or better yet, Ant+.
My Wi-Fi also logs all the cars that pass that have built in WiFi. Kind of crazy how many ways cars can be tracked.
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.
However, the researchers found that these tire sensors also send a unique ID number in clear, unencrypted wireless signals, meaning that anyone nearby with a simple radio receiver can capture the signal, and recognize the same car again later
Its not quite the same ball game. Sure its not great that the government can track easily with ALPRs, but this type of tracking if available to nearly anyone and could be used for significant crimes like stalking or human trafficking. It can also be done without a sightline of the car, unlike a camera system.
Yeah, it should be fixed, but still… Of all possible evil ways to track, this is one of the lesser ones.
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.
As someone who has gotten a flat and not noticed until the tire was destroyed multiple times, I love TPMS systems. They save me money in the long run as the tire can be patched instead of replaced.
How can you not feel it driving? That is kind of scary that you are that absent minded while driving.
Rear tire of a FWD vehicle both times and a small leak while driving on dead straight roads. I was surprised it took me so long to notice as well, but I guess when you’re driving straight and it’s the rear of a FWD vehicle, it’s difficult to notice.
Or just replace your tyres with ones with non sensor.
That said it is a little annoying. My dash is forever telling me it can’t talk to the tyres.
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.
So far I have had success in getting my new car unable to blast out all sorts of uniquely identifiable RF except for this TPMS thing. Does anyone have suggestions on how to deal with this one? Is there maybe a specific brand of sensors that doesn’t send out beacons like this once already paired?
They’re operating on a standard and they’re federally mandated since 2007. It is likely possible to remove them, but it’s going to f with your other safey systems and leave errors all over your dash.
Not to mention the cell phone most of us carry.
I’m tired, boss.
Exhausted.
Me too.
Hey, that’s my line.
Theres a spy device in your pocket.
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.
On the other hand, my 21 year old vehicle has none of it, and my GrapheneOS phone isn’t tracking me either. We didn’t all just give up like you did.
Maybe I should’ve paid >10.000 in spares plus labour for a car I originally spend 21.000 for 8 years ago to buy diesel for for about 2€ per liter rather than switching to an ev for the privilege of ne being tracked rather than “giving up”.
I assume your old vehicle also doesn’t have any type pressure sensors?
I spoke with my landlord about removing power to the home security cameras, because they were Ring. He obliged my request, but I later discovered that he (in private) regards my preference as that of a rebellious teenager in need of a cause. I had to let that sink in… I’m a rebel without a cause because I don’t sip from the same koolaid as he does. Wow.
Does your GrapheneOS phone have a SIM? Because if not, the cell towers are collecting and storing your location.
You can bask in the glory of knowing that you’re better than anyone else. I myself aren’t paranoid enough to really care.
It also had a numberplate, I assume?
The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it’s number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.
This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.
GPS in itself does not do anything, as it does not send, only receive. but even for mobile data, on your phone you have the choice to turn on airplane mode to disable communications. on your car, there’s nothing like it.
also, arguably iphones are more private than any internet connected car.
Your license plate can also be used to track you
They mention this in the article. The difference is that since the tire sensor sends out an RF signal, direct line of sight isn’t necessary. You could throw a tracker up on a roof and grab signals from a block over.
The missing part may be tying that signal to a specific car, but say your car gets pulled over - they could read your tires’ sensor ID and compare it to where they captured it and bam! Now you’re fucked.
You are correct, the only thing worth mentioning is when the laws were created/written it did not account for someone creating a database that is easily searchable/queried to infer all these extra habits of people.
Its one thing visually seeing someone over and over walk or drive by your house while you sit on your porch. It’s another thing to now know where they came from and where they went if you were able to sit on every porch at the same time in a town or city.
This is why police tails need to be granted by a judge, but a interconnected network of cameras at the moment does not recieve the same scrutiny.
I think part of why the cameras don’t have such scrutiny is the city often has signs stating they use the cameras and will list their locations. This gives a somewhat implied consent from the driver, idk if it holds up in court but its similar to a sign at a store saying you’re on CCTV. The sign doesn’t say the CCTV could be used to track and monitor you but its implied.
True, though CCTV or Closed Circuit Television used to be “fully local” and “closed”. Tapes and recordings were only available or accessible to the property or person in most situations being recorded over older recordings.
Newer tech now is interconnected with companies trying to infer extra information from full databases of recordings from multiple different locations all around a town or city, or state.
CCTV used to be like a security guard sitting on a lawn chair. Where modern security cameras/systems are like having a personal tail following you all day and night.
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
Yep. I remember watching a documentary on how to disappear. Car tires and windshields were both covered, because they can contain traceable technology.
Windshields!? That’s a new one
I think it had something to do with the embedded antennas, but I could be mistaken.
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?
This seems like a real stretch.
TPMS signals are too weak to read even 6 ft from the wheels.
No they aren’t. Out of curiosity I setup an rtlsdr and connected it via RTL-HAOS to my home assistant server.
The antenna is in the middle of my house and over the last month I have logged over 200 different tire pressure sensor id’s
Yeah, I don’t know what the range is for picking these signals up, but I know that the detections just scroll on and on on my laptop’s screen when there is any traffic near my house.
I never realized how chatty the world is on the radio spectrum until playing with one of these. From my house, I can see reports from half a dozen water meters (several reporting leaks), readings from wireless weather stations, signals from certain types of remotes, location data from aircraft, and of course bluetooth and wifi signals from phones and homes. The real trick in using this for tracking would be in filtering out all of the information you aren’t interested in.
Yeah this is something a well trained neural network would make simple though. So long as you have the processing power, and enough storage.
I’d imagine you’d be able to purchase some identifying information from data brokers and eventually link ids to people or families.
Yes and no, I think. It isn’t really huge amounts of data, and the patterns aren’t super complex, so a neural network would pick up a lot. But, given how far the signals travel, the intermittent nature of the signals, and how little they can initially be associated with a particular vehicle, I think in most environments associating a particular set of signals with a particular car would require some human field work. Sure, there are circumstances where automated pairing would be trivial (like at a toll booth), but catching signals in the wild and processing by neural net alone might be ok for analyzing traffic patterns while not being enough for surveillance.
Thank you. Nobody is tracking your car from the fucking tpms sensors, they’ll just use ur phone or GPS for God’s sake 😂 hell if u put tpms sensors in backwards that’s enough for the car not to read them. Another nothing burger.
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”
Flock right now advertises that they can track vehicles by bumper stickers and cosmetic damage.
