To take the counterpoint to most comments on this topic: It used to be impractical to track cars to fine granularity. Now that it is practical: maybe we want that? Cars are multi-ton, incredibly-expensive pieces of hardware that operate on shared roadways. There are about 42,000 deaths related to operating them each year. Increased tracking would simplify the challenges of * Finding stolen vehicles * Discovering the…
We could also just be less dependent on cars, but that's more difficult than mass surveillance. Also has the side effect of enabling dissidence rather than chilling it.
Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
161–170 of 198 posts
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
With MA ez-pass, the enabling legislation specifically forbade the use of it for speed patrolling. (This may have been limited to i-90 which was the only thing that used it at the time.)
Wnen they implemented seat-belt laws, they (in at least some places) said that it would not be used as the primary reason to pull you over, it would be a secondary infraction. That changed. They can tell you whatever you need to hear to get you to vote for it, then change the law later.
Today (the present), we do know that this particular MA law has not changed.
We cannot know that it will change.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#163Your location isn't that big a deal. They can easily get that from License Plate Readers. What will be interesting, is if they ever use the data to give you tickets. I know that there was a discussion of a plan to use the New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths/EZ-Pass to judge speed between two points, and mail you a ticket. I don't think it ever made it out of the starting gate.
Also, NY has operational speed cameras while NJ doesn't:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/speed-camer...
Location metadata can and will be used for Kafkaesque tracking of people for economic and surveillance purposes, guilt by proximity including charging people with crimes, putting people on various kinds of watchlists, and pre-crime harassment.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#164To take the counterpoint to most comments on this topic: It used to be impractical to track cars to fine granularity. Now that it is practical: maybe we want that? Cars are multi-ton, incredibly-expensive pieces of hardware that operate on shared roadways. There are about 42,000 deaths related to operating them each year. Increased tracking would simplify the challenges of * Finding stolen vehicles * Discovering the…
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#165My car was stolen a year ago. If it wasn’t for the iPhone app tracker I had I never would have gotten it back. Police didn’t have any way to track it.
The difference is that here, the police refuse to help if it's not a life-threatening emergency. I had the position of some AirPod Pros with an AirTag attached, and I watched it commute to a house. The police here refused to do anything about it.
Another time, they refused to do anything about a stream of idiot tourists driving the wrong way on a one-way street right in front of them who couldn't get to anywhere, causing gridlock.
If you ever want your stolen property back here, you must get a weapon and collect it yourself.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been since 3G that I delved into baseband specs in any depth, but I would not trust a powered up phone not to be commanded to connect to a network.
Couldn’t this easily be proven by monitoring transmission power from the device? There are all sorts of people who go on vacation and use the switch to avoid roaming charges. It would be plainly obvious to those people that their supposedly offline phone went online when they look at their bill. Or is there some secret apn bypass?
If there is a secret involved in this it would be undocumented commands sent by the network to phones that then interpret them as commands to connect to the network, plus baseband processors the periodically look for such commands. They don't radiate, so very little power is used, but they should be entirely dormant.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my case I can’t drive my car then because the RF also handles the location beacon which is required for the class 3 alarm system which is needed for the insurance. Without insurance you can’t drive. So there are many situations where unfortunately this is not an option.
Sounds like the problem is the insurance company.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
That really, really depends. My stepdaughter was involved in a he-said, she-said collision in a lighted intersection. "I believe I had the green light", "no, I believe I had". So me, thinking, talking to insurer, "While not definitive, if the EDR shows that she was a complete stop for 30s before moving, that might show she was stopped at a red, and then went when it turned green". Insurer: unless we're looking at six…
> Insurer: unless we're looking at six digits in a claim, we're not pulling EDR data. Fascinating. You'd think that would be the first thing used before any humans even speak.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#169It will be easier to drone bomb each and every one who is against the US government or its associates. Terrifying
Well, if they were going to do that, there's nothing stopping them from doing it right now when you get home.
I think the keyword here is easier. Probably far more scalable too. A car only moves when someone is driving it. Correlate this with phone location, if you have it, and you can be pretty certain you got your victim.
Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Surely you can find the GPS antenna and disconnect it?
Is the GPS two way or one way? I had the impression that the GPS signals went from satellite to earth, but the receivers did not send a signal to the GPS satellite. I thought onstar connected the cellular network. If I have the wrong information and somebody has more specifics about this, I would really like to know. From reading the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnStar Looks like the cellular network…