this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2026
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It also had a numberplate, I assume?
The point on this is the cars are broadcasting the numbers. Imagine your license plate including a loud speaker that shouted it's number while the car was running. Tracking via plate requires line of sight. Tracking it in an automated way requires a good high speed camera, text analysis computer vision to log the vehicles, and storage for all of the images. In contrast, this signal is a repeating unencrypted broadcast. I could build a Raspberry Nano device that I can sit next to an intersection and capture the numbers of every vehicle that drives by. It is also just presumably storing the number and time, so years of tracking data could be managed with a gig or two of storage.
This is absolutely a threat, and I am surprised it is not actively exploited by companies like Walmart to track every vehicle which drives by their stores and enters their parking lots. Hell, Amazon has enough vehicles out driving around that they could pretty effectively generate profiles for every vehicle in a town just by equipping their trucks with scanners and compiling the data into a behavior analysis system. Every car which drives past is read and stored. It is truly worrying.