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Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

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161–170 of 198 posts

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#161

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.

I'd like to hope that increasing surveillance in car infrastructure would have this side-effect.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#162
post #28

Earlier 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.

Laws can change in the future, just as anything else can also change in the future. But we can't know what the future holds.

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

#163

Your 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

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

#164

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…

The concern is that if the government is tracking where you go while you're inside the car, they also have a pretty good idea of your actual destination, which could be a problem in e.g. states with laws against abortions even in other states or if, say, a school teacher was tracked to a known gay nightclub in Florida.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#165

My 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.

I hid 4 AirTags and 2 Tile Pros in my vehicle. GFL finding them.

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

#166
post #35

Earlier 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?

Depending on how careful you are and what equipment you've got on hand, you might be able to detect that going on, but I think "easily" is a stretch.

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

#167
post #139

Earlier 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.

One could do really cheap insurance if you monitor and record the customer 24/7 with real time adjustments! The strangest things would end up costing money. Cheap cloths would suggest the wrong kind of social life, expensive would invite robbery. A profile for each song you play and one for those you've listened to. etc

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#168
post #125

Earlier 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.

It's also a gamble. Money and labor to retrieve the data, possibly out of a seriously damaged vehicle (making it difficult to get to it). And then if you're in a situation where EDR is your best source of verifiability (no eyewitnesses, etc.) you're also gambling that the story coming from your customer was accurate and doesn't increase the liability that you've helpfully provided evidence of.

Re: Carmakers Will Give Your Location to Police Without a Warrant, Senators Say

#169

It 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.

> when

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

#170

Earlier 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…

If you disconnect the GPS antenna the car won’t be able to get a GPS position to report via OnStar.
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