Comment on Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
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?
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 18 hours ago
TPMS signals are too weak to read even 6 ft from the wheels.
ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
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
GreatAlbatross@feddit.uk 14 minutes ago
Yep, through misunderstanding I left rtl_433 auto addition switched on for over a year.
I think I ended up with over 9000 unique tpms entries.
Clearing them out from MQTT was a pain in the backside, too!
toast@retrolemmy.com 15 hours ago
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.
ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
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.
innermachine@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
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.