License Plates, Vin Numbers clearly available on the dash, Tire Sensors, Bluetooth MAC, WIFI MAC, Cellular IDs for most even if you don’t pay for the service.
It’s an interesting thing to point out, but we’re mostly driving around with much higher power sensors than the pressure sensors.
Not to mention the cell phone most of us carry.
Your car has a series of numbers and letters on the back of it that are unique to the vehicle, and can be used to track you as well. There are even automated cameras that can do this.
Tracking a vehicle is easy, and always has been.
However, the researchers found that these tire sensors also send a unique ID number in clear, unencrypted wireless signals, meaning that anyone nearby with a simple radio receiver can capture the signal, and recognize the same car again later
Its not quite the same ball game. Sure its not great that the government can track easily with ALPRs, but this type of tracking is available to nearly anyone and could be used for significant crimes like stalking or human trafficking. It can also be done without a sightline of the car, unlike a camera system.
Yeah, it should be fixed, but still… Of all possible evil ways to track, this is one of the lesser ones.
Ha, they’ll have to install working sensors on mine first 😈
Dude, my car has GPS and a 4G internet connection as well as my android phone and my work required iPhone … In a world like this, Tyre sensors are probably not required to track me.
GPS in itself does not do anything, as it does not send, only receive. but even for mobile data, on your phone you have the choice to turn on airplane mode to disable communications. on your car, there’s nothing like it.
also, arguably iphones are more private than any internet connected car.
It also had a numberplate, I assume?
On the other hand, my 21 year old vehicle has none of it, and my GrapheneOS phone isn’t tracking me either. We didn’t all just give up like you did.
I spoke with my landlord about removing power to the home security cameras, because they were Ring. He obliged my request, but I later discovered that he (in private) regards my preference as that of a rebellious teenager in need of a cause. I had to let that sink in… I’m a rebel without a cause because I don’t sip from the same koolaid as he does. Wow.
Does your GrapheneOS phone have a SIM? Because if not, the cell towers are collecting and storing your location.
You can bask in the glory of knowing that you’re better than anyone else. I myself aren’t paranoid enough to really care.
Flock in a few months: “introducing a license plate reader that doesn’t need to see the license plate. The magnet leaf you got on Amazon to get through red light cameras won’t be enough to fool our dystopian surveillance system anymore”
Flock right now advertises that they can track vehicles by bumper stickers and cosmetic damage.
TIL that these sensors transmitted via a wireless signal rather than being hardwired. I’ve never heard of them needing to be replaced due to dead batteries.
The system required to make them hard wired would be immensely over complicated to allow the wheels to still turn. Where ever the wire exits would also have been additional point for leaks to occur.
TPMS batteries last a long time because they are transponders, they use very little energy, but they eventually die.
The batteries last about 10 years.
I’ve had one die, and just waited to replace it until I needed new tires. It was like $100 extra to replace all 4, so I don’t have to worry for another decade
They discovered a thing that everyone’s known forever. Here’s Bruce Schneier in 2008
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/04/tracking_vehicl.html
Yep. I remember watching a documentary on how to disappear. Car tires and windshields were both covered, because they can contain traceable technology. This was a decade ago, at least.
Windshields!? That’s a new one
I think it had something to do with the embedded antennas, but I could be mistaken.
Your license plate can also be used to track you
You are correct, the only thing worth mentioning is when the laws were created/written it did not account for someone creating a database that is easily searchable/queried to infer all these extra habits of people.
Its one thing visually seeing someone over and over walk or drive by your house while you sit on your porch. It’s another thing to now know where they came from and where they went if you were able to sit on every porch at the same time in a town or city.
This is why police tails need to be granted by a judge, but a interconnected network of cameras at the moment does not recieve the same scrutiny.
I think part of why the cameras don’t have such scrutiny is the city often has signs stating they use the cameras and will list their locations. This gives a somewhat implied consent from the driver, idk if it holds up in court but its similar to a sign at a store saying you’re on CCTV. The sign doesn’t say the CCTV could be used to track and monitor you but its implied.
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?
This seems like a real stretch.
TPMS signals are too weak to read even 6 ft from the wheels.
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
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.
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.
Yes and no, I think. It isn’t really huge amounts of data, and the patterns aren’t super complex, so a neural network would pick up a lot. But, given how far the signals travel, the intermittent nature of the signals, and how little they can initially be associated with a particular vehicle, I think in most environments associating a particular set of signals with a particular car would require some human field work. Sure, there are circumstances where automated pairing would be trivial (like at a toll booth), but catching signals in the wild and processing by neural net alone might be ok for analyzing traffic patterns while not being enough for surveillance.
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.
I’m tired, boss.
Hey, that’s my line.
Me too.
among the hundreds of other things that “could be tracking me”
at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if my inner most thoughts weren’t already uploaded to some giant government server.
James Brown, in his later years, believed he was being surveilled by electronic devices in his teeth. When we read “that’s a thing” next year and no one acts surprised you can forgive him his PCP usage.
Bro, ongoing government surveillance. No one should be surprised by that now. The mask is off.
Jokes on them. My TPMS sensors died a while ago, and I haven’t felt the need to fix it.
Now I’m a ghost! /s
The rfid tag is probably still good and whatever is on the receiving end isn’t working.Apparently it’s an active system these days.
It seems that the system is not RFID or passive, but an active system that requires a battery to transmit data. It’s far more likely that the batteries, which typically lasts about the length of time I’ve owned my car, are just drained.
TPMS are transponders.
I bought cheap tires from Walmart for both cars and the tpms failed on both cars.
A local city proudly mentioned on the news that they had a system that could track TPMS sensors. Pretty much all cars after 2008 uses TPMS sensors that each broadcast a unique identifier to the car. They aren’t hard to remove, and you can buy valve stems that fit your car (0.452 hole) at any auto parts store.
By “aren’t hard to remove” you actually mean requires dismounting the tire from the rim, remounting it, and then balacing it. This is far beyond the capabilities not to mention equipment of the typical layperson. Plus, your state is likely to conveniently fail your car on its next inspection for a nonfunctioning TPMS system, same as your check engine light.
If you’re going to go the distance anyway, get your tire shop to mount aftermarket Autel sensors in your rims. Using the readily available diagnostic tool, you can occasionally reprogram those (wirelessly!) with a set of random IDs and then also program your car to use them. You’ll be a lot tougher to track if your signature is different every week.
I’m not about to do this just yet, but I do have the tool for more mundane purposes and I only paid around $200 for it several years ago.
It seems most states with mandatory vehicle inspections don’t fail for TPMS problems.
https://www.tirerack.com/upgrade-garage/what-are-state-tpms-regulations
That only lists 18 states…
My own state requires it despite that list implying they don’t. Thus I really don’t think that chart is completely accurate. If you have ANY warning lights on your dash at inspection you will be failed here.
I did say most, not all. Some of the info on that page may be outdated, but obviously it would just be limited to those that require regular comprehensive inspections in the first place.
I was able to easily look up the inspection guidelines from my states DMV page and confirm for myself that TPMS light is not a fail here so YMMV, but my point was essentially that it’s more likely than not that bad sensors won’t fail someone, not that nobody will get failed.
18 out of 50 is not ‘most’.
Plus, your state is likely to conveniently fail your car on its next inspection
Your who is going to do what now?
(Posted from a state that doesn’t check anything except emissions, and even then only for some cars in some urban areas.)
Fuck that sounds like a place full of dangerously badly maintained vehicles…
Surprisingly, most people aren’t actually suicidally negligent in the absence of government regulation.
Eh. I’ve seen enough 300+ HP cars with 10+ year old bald tires and paper thin brake discs to believe otherwise. I personally know two people whose cars have broken wipers that simply don’t work. They don’t care. I know one guy whose car’s passenger door can only be opened by sticking the designated door opening pliers, which are stored under the seat, into the door panel through the hole of that door lock indicator peg thing and then fishing for some lever or whatever. You’re simply not gonna be opening that door in an emergency. One dude at my office has an old manual BMW with a shifter knob that just loosely sits on its lever, and can easily come off if you are not careful. Gotta blindly maneuver the knob back onto its spot underneath the leather cover when that happens. He drives it like that daily. No shortage of hideously dirty diesel engines. No shortage of badly misaligned headlights, nonfunctional brake lights, overly loud engines etc.
In short I not only think state inspections are a good idea, I even think they should be even stricter.
You would be extremely surprised. Car maintenance is expensive, and lack of inspection very often leads to people driving vehicles that should have been off the road years ago simply because a lot of states that axe it, axe inspections because they’re expensive for the driver (a lot of these states are in the former Steel Belt). In better-off areas or places where people have more time/money/equipment/space to wrench on cars, then yes, but here in my city, I definitely have seen cars where the entire frame is basically being held together by Bondo and prayer, cars where they’re running on 4 spares, cars where enormous sections of the body paneling are just gone. I’ve nearly been hit by people who clearly relied on yearly inspections to tell them “hey your brakes are failing” because they drive on autopilot and just adjust how they drive to accommodate failing/failed brakes.
In fact, I suspect maintenance costs are HIGHER in areas without inspection, because shops could rely on that regular-ish influx of cash even if it was only like $50-$100 a vehicle, AND you have the customer in the shop, so it’s easier to go “hey you really need brakes, it’ll cost you an extra $200 and take an extra hour or two”.
That is actually surprising, given people.
Survivorship bias
State inspections are a racket. This is coming from a state inspector. Waste of time and money! I only got certified so I can inspect my own and wife’s vehicles. Well that and it’s invaluable at work but shit if your determined to drive an unroadworthy POS the lack of a sticker on ur windshield and the possibility u MIGHT get a 50$ fine and no points is not enough to deter the idiots from driving rolling scrap heaps anyways. Seen em before and will continue to see em weather inspections are mandated or not.
State inspection of your vehicle? Wtf? I’ve heard of California with catalytic converters because the smog, that’s it. I
I don’t understand the confusion.
What shitholy states force you to get them inspected, obviously.
How is making sure everyone’s >2 ton 100mph missile is safe to use shitholy?
If they are checking that your spyware is installed still, it gives lie to their motivation.
This spyware is a byproduct of how the wireless tpms sensors work. If someone installed a wired version it would still pass.
Both over and under inflated tyres present a significant reduction in handling and breaking abilities of cars. Having the correct air pressure in your tyres is fairly important when push comes to shove.
It certainly doesn’t require removing the tire from the rim. I removed each wheel, broke the bead on the side that has the valve stem, pried the tire back away from the rim, remove the sensor (mine had a convenient little part you can push to release them) then air the tire back up and put the wheel back on the car. Didn’t even have to re-balance them.
If we want to take steps to protect ourselves from such tracking, we cannot afford to simply say “It’s ToO hArD!!!1!” with a multi-paragraph reply that took more time to type out than it took for me to remove one sensor. Can’t do it? Learn how. Defeatist replies belong on Reddit with all the other propaganda.
Hope y threw ur phone away and got rid of ur head unit while u were at it. Tpms tracking is just about the last fucking thing I’d ever worry about especially with the lack of range those transponders have. Nobody is tracking you via tpms 😂
You know that you can leave your phone at home, right?
EDIT: Also, another Defeatist reply.
Yeah, a couple problems with that:
- You’re going to have a tire pressure light on forever.
- There’s a reason these are mandated. They’re critical safety (and efficiency) systems.
As always, these are systems of convenience, and the alternative is to check your tire pressures every day before leaving home.
Older cars use a wheel speed sensor-based TPMS. It’s not as effective or reliable but it also doesn’t emit any signals that can be read by other devices.
I managed to drive cars for 30 years without a TPMS sensor and the only time I ever had a to check the pressure on a tire, was when I knew i had a leak and didn’t have time to fix it. I can also tell by the way my car drives if a tire is soft. I also had an air pump in my car powered by a cigarette lighter adapter that I could fill my tires.
My current car, from 2019 doesn’t have one. I’ve managed to own it 7 years (this week) without needing to check the pressure 2500 times.
The assertion you need to check your pressure everyday without a TPMS system is ridiculous.
If you didn’t check your tire pressure in the last 20 minutes how do you know you didn’t just drive over a nail and get a slow leak? TPMS checks every few seconds so you know when there is a small problem. Anyone will notice a fully flat tire, but a lot of people used to drive on low tire pressure for months without knowing. Once someone knew their tire had a problem they would check daily (until they got it fixed), but many people never knew in the first place, and even though who did know often took a week before they found out - they of course have no way to know since nobody checked their tire pressure daily much less every 20 minutes.
Low tire pressure is not a safety issue, more of a efficiency issue, until it is so low that you’d need to be paying ZERO attention to the car’s handling to not notice. Lower pressure actually increases performance (to a point, and depending on the tire) because it can allow more rubber to contact the road. It is pretty typical to air down to around 20 psi for performance driving even if it’s closer to 35 for daily driving.
It’s very easy to notice if one tire loses pressure because you’ll have a very strong pull to one side, almost like a bad alignment. I got my tires rotated at a shop and they deflated the tires for some reason and forgot to refill one of them. On my way home I was freaking out that they fucked my alignment because it was handling so weird on the suburban roads home (not even twisty performance driving). My TPMS didn’t even go off until I was basically home already. When I checked the tire it was maybe 15 or 20. Certainly not dangerous but also certainly noticeable.
Have you met people? Do you think that battered old Chevy is driven by someone who cares about the TPMS light? They can ignore it as effectively as the check engine light.
I’ve been driving for 30 years. Do you want to guess how many times that’s happened to me?
Meanwhile, I’ve apparently been living in a totalitarian surveillance state for at least a few years now, and you know how many times that’s happened to me? I’ll give you a hint, it’s more than the number of times I’ve run over a nail causing me to drive around on low tire pressure without knowing it.
What matters is the whole community. Statistically it happens to someone in your community. Society wasted a lot of fuel (read global warming) just on low tire pressure.
Surveillance is a problem. So is global warming.
That may have been the intention but I doubt it ever worked as effectively as they claimed it would. Besides, it will probably cost at least 1 AI data-center of carbon emissions to continuously surveil all these people with TPMS sensors, so the argument could be made that you’re actually reducing carbon pollution at this point by removing yours.
I am suspicious of that being the motivation behind this.
The fact that you’ve gotten away with it is not proof that it’s unnecessary. The fact that it was legally mandated is good evidence that it is. These systems save lives, no question about it.
Legal != effective or ethical, that is an unbelievably stupid argument for TPMS.
LOL who said anything about ethics? This is an unbelievably stupid strawman.
indeed, you said this:
The fact that it was legally mandated is good evidence that it is.
but their point was laws are not always made with good intentions and safety in mind. that’s not to say TPMS is required for secret surveillance, but that there being a law for it does not immediately mean there’s good purpose for that law.
indeed, you said this
Indeed, that had nothing to do with ethics.
lots of things are legally mandated without any good evidence.
Lots of things legally mandated in the past are now unconscionable or illegal now.
I live in Canada and my snow tires haven’t had functioning TPMS in years. I do have a tire pressure light on forever, and they’re not mandated.
Cool. Did you come here just to tell us that you’re proud to drive unsafely or what?
Do you drive without a LIDAR? Why, do you like to live dangerously?
If my car had LIDAR I would certainly take reasonable measures to ensure it continued working, yes.
My snow tires didn’t come with TPMS sensors.
Because they’re not mandated.
Just like LIDAR wasn’t mandated on your car when you bought it.
TPMS sensors are in the wheels, not the tires. The only way they would no longer be there is if you had them removed.
1.) Lol, no I won’t. That light can be removed. Or if it’s a Ford, you can access the vehicle with Forscan and turn off that functionality.
2.) How did we ever survive before 2008? Were there disabled cars with shredded tires every 20 feet? Was it an apocalypse of failed tires? People who don’t bother to check tire pressure won’t bother for yet another warning light on their dash.
That light can be removed
LOL often times it cannot, because it’s not a “light” at all on modern vehicles.
How did we ever survive before 2008?
A lot of people didn’t. That’s why it was mandated.
Maybe YOU can’t remove the light.
This has nothing to with me.
They aren’t hard to remove, and you can buy valve stems that fit your hole at any auto parts store.
Good to know.
They are hard to remove, and require a variety of expensive specialty tools to do properly.
You can get close enough just clipping some weights of the same weight as the sensor to the valve stem. A static balance isn’t hard to do - not nearly as good as the proper dynamic balance the tire shop will do, but often good enough.
You still have to remove and reinstall the tire…
One side of the tire. I did not have to remove the tires from the rims, and I didn’t have to balance them.
deleted by creator
Motorcycles stay winning.
Unless you’ve got some expensive whiz-bang Harley or BMW.
Yeah, I dont have any, nice try
Any car or any tire?
tire sensors
Unfortunately, I do. And they lock you in to licensed vendors just for your seasonal tyre change.
Looks like my next car is going to be an antique.
Wonder what kind of car you have, because my last 2 cars had a procedure to train/program a new TPMS, and some cars (according to Google) will automatically learn new sensors after about 20 minutes of driving.
