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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

"Why can the government force me to display a license plate on my car? I'm an innocent citizen; they have no right to force me to bear a code like I'm a criminal."

The privilege of operating on public roadways imposes some obligations on vehicle operators. What those obligations should be is a pros-cons trade-off that has little to do with the criminal-guilt threshold.

If the tech is cheap enough, there are a lot of hypothetical upsides to constantly tracking every multi-ton machine on the road. Observe, for comparison, the FAA requirements for flight plans and running a broadcasting transponder to safely operate an airplane.

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> If the tech is cheap enough, there are a lot of hypothetical upsides to constantly tracking every multi-ton machine on the road. Observe, for comparison, the FAA requirements for flight plans and running a broadcasting transponder to safely operate an airplane.

If the tech is cheap enough, you could argue that there are hypothetical upsides to having a tracker implanted inside every citizen as well. After all those citizens are capable of illegal behavior and must be monitored.

Sure could. There's a reason the Constitutional protection is against "unreasonable" search and seizure (with the definition of what that word means left up to the courts).

If, some day, most people decide it's worth it to track every individual, the law will bend to allow it.

> Observe, for comparison, the FAA requirements for flight plans and running a broadcasting transponder to safely operate an airplane.

If you're talking about ADS-B, the only parallel to a database that is owned/operated by manufactures of the vehicles is that they broadcast a signal -- but that's where any form of parallel stops/ends, because the signal from vehicles is not intended not to be broadcasted in such way as to be publicly consumable; which is precisely why the car manufacturers control a monopoly on that data and why law enforcement goes to them for the data.

Planes could arguably operate just as safely before those transponders -- they just couldn't be tracked publicly by anyone (or each other) in real time. Being able to track something doesn't - automatically - infer any upsides, whatsoever, just that we know where the plane is and/or went.

I agree with the first point but not the second. Transponders enable TCAS and TCAS has saved many lives.

Those were radar-based (before ADS-B), I thought?

Nope, TCAS has always been based on secondary surveillance (i.e. transponders). Before ADS-B, it was based on Mode S. Air traffic control has used primary radar and even more primitive methods (position/speed/bearing reports over radio) to maintain separation since long before transponders. The in-cockpit automated "traffic traffic" advisory and "climb climb" or "descend descend" resolution advisory come from TCAS, which relies on transponders.

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