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Comment by codefreakxff | Hacker News Reader

It really doesn't take very much creativity to abuse this system. How about a database of who bought each tire cross referenced to a monitoring strip in the road to see who is going where? How about that monitoring strip being in the entrance to every fast food joint, restaurant, store, mall, etc - now you can track drivers just like we track browsers. Since we have your name, we can cross reference your driving and browsing history.

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And if you put a video camera in a strategic location you can capture every license plate that pass by...

This is exactly what I was thinking. As much as these RFIDs seem like a privacy issue, a license plate is already there and in many ways a more accessible way to track a vehicle.

Especially now that state governments have redesigned the plates to be more easily read by OCR.

That is not the same. Rfid tracking / filtering is much easier and more precise than video. There is no need for computer vision or any kind of expensive computing. Also it is far easier to abuse by evil civilians. Consider the overhead of installing a high enough quality video camera on a public road for a criminal compared to an Rfid reader.

Thungs Guide to RFID:

Scan all local Police cars. Install readers around Thugs HQ.

While the parent comment was definitely lacking in creativity, a unique RFID in each tire isn't terribly different from a unique barcode on each tire. I'd honestly be surprised if most products I own didn't have one of those.

> I'd honestly be surprised if most products I own didn't have one of those.

A barcode or an RFID tag? The only reason most of your products don't have an RFID tag is that barcodes are much cheaper, and the entire logistics chain - from manufacturing to retail - is already pretty well optimized around those. There is not much value to gain. About the only use for passive radio tags I've seen widely deployed is theft prevention, and half of the times the tags are removed at the counter and later reused.

A barcode. I mean that RFIDs are functionally very similar for purposes of maintaining a database to something (barcodes) that is already very likely on most consumer goods.

Indeed. Hell, any somewhat complicated product, like an electronic device, usually has several barcodes inside it, as they're also widely used in manufacturing - not just for automating things, but mostly for process control. A person who put the motherboard inside your computer most likely had to scan several barcodes at his station in order to report that those-and-those parts have been connected and passed forward.

(Source: I worked on a software that reads those barcodes and controls the manufacturing process.)

Nitpick: Barcodes are not (generally) unique to a specific item, just a specific SKU. Whereas RFID chips are item-specifc, so there is a difference. In other words, barcodes won't allow one to differentiate between 2 identical bags of chips, but an RFID tag will allow one to differentiate between 2 identical tires.

When you're talking supply chain, be advised that there are more symbologies and more uses of them than the UPC or EAN codes used at retail checkstands. Most companies do use a unique or semi-unique number to identify a unit as it's moving through their processes. They also barcode the model number as well.

Barcode would absolutely allow you to differentiate between any two cell phones, or cars, or computers.

When you buy tires from e.g. TireRack they are automatically registered with the government.

Citation on this please?

https://www.tirerack.com/tires/tiretech/techpage.jsp?techid=...

I think you're parsing this incorrectly.

My reading is that Tirerack registers the DOT Tire Identification Numbers with the tire manufacturers. Not with "the government". It's the manufacturer who is liable for damages from defective tires. So it's the manufacturer who needs this information.

Ah, I see. It still results in the creation of a direct mapping from week/year of manufacture to name and address, which wouldn't be difficult for a government to obtain and use. If the tire RFID contains a serial number, then a few geographic correlations would be enough to assign that serial to a specific person.

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