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”
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.
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
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?
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’m tired, boss.
Hey, that’s my line.
Me too.
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.
I bought cheap tires from Walmart for both cars and the tpms failed on both cars.
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.
Bro, ongoing government surveillance. No one should be surprised by that now. The mask is off.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 response.
lots of things are legally mandated without any good evidence.
Lots of things legally mandated in the past are now unconscionable or illegal now.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Eh, the fucking cellular modems in my car that stream the camera data for training can be used to track me. Hell, the anti theft tracker that I paid money for can be used to track me.
They can, but both of those are often encrypted such that it is at least hard. TPMS isn’t encrypted so it is easy to figure out what cars are going by.
Encryption wouldn’t solve anything anyway. The problem is not the content of the messages, that’s just tire pressure, which changes constantly, and wouldn’t be useful. The problem is the unique identifier that’s being broadcast constantly. Theoretically its a very simple fix: Just implement a sort of rolling code that periodically modifies the identifier.
Ha the undisableable built in gps does that much better.
Depends on the attacker. The GPS is better if you have access to the car, but getting that is hard. Any idiot with a radio can read the TPMS sensors of every car going by - there is nothing that even slows them down.
That idiot would be better off just using a camera and capture the license plates…hell, they can even do that from even further away. Using the ID of TPMS for tracking is probably the least effective or usable way to track vehicles of the literal dozen of much better ways.
I made sure my car doesn’t come with a cellular modem. But I didn’t knew about the pressure sensors.
Their is an onstar gps in them too.
But it can’t transmit without a modem.
How so? A sopranos episode they hire a dude to take it out of the car.
To be fair, that’s not transmitting.
How so?
GPS units do not transmit, they only receive the signal from the satellites. I wouldn’t take advice from TV fiction.
I would, from that show.
My truck hasn’t been able to communicate with my tire pressure sensors for years, I’m not worried about mine.
Your car insurance might be interested to know this fact.
Fucking narc
This was a tip to OP, in case he wasn’t aware. Insurances will use any pretext to weasel out of their contractual obligations.
They would be. That’s why you don’t tell them. If you’re treating your insurance company as your friend not an adversary, you probably don’t understand how their profits grow year over year.
