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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Car privacy has been dead for a decade or more between cashless toll systems, cellular carriers and LPR. It's not coming back.

Sticking your head in the sand and pushing back against a system that is necessary to protect the safety of the driving public as automated vehicles become a thing is shortsighted.

Image recognition technology is such that you likely have a dozen or more government and private entities noticing you. You can buy data from cell carriers to know the average income of travelers on a road at a given time for 45 minute drive in urban and suburban areas.

Hell, I built a parking gate system for somebody with a raspberry pi and an outdoor security camera sourced from EBay -- and I'm a dope with no unique skill in these areas.

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This is different. It is full surveillance everywhere, for every car and everytime. Not just some roads with cameras. Whose pictures (at least in Germany) are supposed not to be saved except for trucks.

It's there now.

In the US, I'm sure the FBI and DEA have realtime feeds of phone movements for thousands or millions of phones. They had pervasive LPR surveillance a decade ago.

Perhaps. But you can put your phone on airplane mode or turn it off or just leave it at home if you don't want it to be tracked.

You really believe a phone is truly switched off? Unless the main processor kills the baseband power by GPIO, it is not - and baseband processors are a fairly easy exploit target, much more so for a state-level threat.

I can leave it at home or buy a phone that has hardware validation processes to ascertain its correctness when turned off (or the transmitter system is disabled). I could put the phone in a Farraday cage or selectively raise the noise level of certain broadcast ranges within a limited range. I could kill the radio-IC and use a wifi mesh network. All of these measures are not prevented by federal law.

Federally mandating trackers in a car is a completely different story. It will be illegal to remove these trackers, so a basic liberty will be taken away.

Uber tracks you every 30 seconds. They struggle with it at that scale.

http://highscalability.com/blog/2016/9/28/how-uber-manages-a...

10 times a second made me laugh out loud.

The car transmits 10 times a second to assist other vehicles, signals or traffic management systems.

The notion that big brother is going to track you in tenth if a second increments is not a thing.

Unnecessary with radar, lidar, etc.

What's the point? Oh, to invade privacy at some future date.

> Car privacy has been dead for a decade or more between cashless toll systems, cellular carriers and LPR. It's not coming back.

None of these things are remotely similar to legally mandated broadcasting of your location multiple times per second. They do not constitute a reason to sacrifice privacy for some nebulous safety gains.

The rest of your comment is just FUD.

I'm not a privacy zealot by any stretch, nor a car engineer, but it's not really clear that this system will actually do much to improve safety anyway.

This won't be widespread for 20 years and the data quality coming out of cars will be very mixed.

It seems pretty ridiculous to invest in this rather than allocating funds to things that are both useful immediately and in the long term, like actually painting lane markings everywhere.

Your entire comment assumes all those things are permanent, when in fact, given the political will, they can easily be stopped.

You provide no reason not to fight things getting even worse.

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