There are services you can pay for (in the US) to track a car’s (almost) real-time location without gps. It’s based upon license plates and widespread webcams and it’s not illegal (yet).
The government does need a warrant to put a GPS tracker on a car.
Although, these days, your car already has one or more GPS devices in it sending that data to third parties. And there are many organizations that run plate readers on public streets.
It's wishful thinking to believe that we'll be able to prevent anyone from tracking our car's movements. It's just too easy; even without devices like AirTags.
GPS trackers cost like $50 and are smaller than a cell phone (thicker though because they usually have a big battery/lots of batteries). They're weather/waterproof for the most part and have strong magnets to attach to the underside of a car where no normal person would ever look. They usually come with hard-wire options as well so you can tie into a car's 12V system (depending on the car this is either trivial/fast with a vampire tap or a time consuming activity).
These devices can't be easily detected from a cell phone; it's easier to physically look for them than to try to capture their wireless emissions (unless you have special equipment). Some of them just record their locations over time and don't even emit anything at all but there's probably some that can communicate these logs via Bluetooth but I'm not sure how common that is.
Using an AirTag to track someone's car is basically ridiculously lazy and risky... Too easy for the target to notice IMHO.
For reference, most of the folks on HN could probably make their own GPS tracker with their microcontroller of choice and a ~$5 GPS breakout. Could even get super fancy to have it transmit coordinates via LoRa and whatnot. You could even 3D print an enclosure for it that precisely matches the contours of the underside of a (specific) car so that it wouldn't be found unless you were super duper familiar with what the underside of your car looked like.
Get rid of license plates. They can also be used by private parties to track car movements. They aren't safe anymore in this time and age. Once someone builds a proof of concept of a real time car tracker using crowd sourced license plate trackers, we'll realize that.
In the US, at least, your license plate can get scanned by cameras driving around and you show up on security cameras (with improving facial recognition).
What's a domain analogous to computers without tracking? I suppose all those are "by computers" at the end of the day, but I can't think of anything I do that isn't tracked somehow.
I'm torn on the subject of car tracking. Firstly it's not like it doesn't happen already, it's just that the authorities don't have access to the data. Secondly, drivers in a lot of countries are simply morons (read: you meet several when driving for 30 minutes), though I can't say I've met a lot of them in US.
On the other hand, there are the privacy and security (and possibly safety) issues...
But personally, I wouldn't buy any car that has any outside communication, possibly except for locks, heh.
Step 1: Place GPS tracking device on every car (alternatives include demand GPS tracking devices be built into cars by manufacturers or build them into license plates as part of a move to save money on toll collections).
Step 2: Analyze data algorithmically, looking for suspicious correlations.
Step 3: 1984.
Another thought: If you don't need a warrant to place GPS tracking device on a car, you ought to be able to obtain location tracking data from a telephone company without a warrant. Wherever your phone goes, the FBI is simply following you with a virtual agent.
True, but raw GPS works well enough in cell dead spots on my car, so I probably wouldn’t notice the difference.
The other problem is that they’d likely log the GPS track, and upload it all at once if anyone ever re-enabled cell data, which kind of defeats the whole thing.
Maybe the switch would have to be for all the radios (even FM, Bluetooth, etc, if yo want to be extra tin foil hatty).
Even with that, commercial license plate cameras still would track the car.
I’m beginning to think the only solution is legislative (probably via direct democracy, because Silicon Valley corporate lobbyists are too powerful these days...)
There are plenty of very good reasons to track vehicle locations (ex. new road planning, maintenance). Problem is, there are plenty more, more profitable, reasons to do so (ex. invading your privacy to sell you ads).
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