Surveillance Company Claims It Can Track Nearly Any Car in Real-Time

Surveillance Company Claims It Can Track Nearly Any Car in Real-Time(gizmodo.com)

29 points by karinakarina 5 years ago | 15 comments

samstave 5 years ago |

Yeah this company can fuck itself, eat a bag of dicks and hopefully die.

I don't want to live in a world of surveillance such as this and anyone working for this company should down-right fuck off.

We already built a surveillance system that is too vast.

go fuck yourself:

Source: I helped build tracking tech for Lockheed, was the personal tech trainer for Tom Ridge when he joined the board of Lockheed and used to go to his house

I was also director at [company] when my team built all the Vizio, Samsung, LG spying tech into your Television... [Real-time screenshots from your TV, what you are watching and other data] ((kill your smart TV))

Yeah - it sickens me and this company can get fucked.

I am so tired of growing up in a world where I read science fiction in the 80s and thought "wouldnt it be cool if" and then helped make this dystopian nightmare of surveillance that we now live in.

Any engineer working on this crap should not be proud of the genie they just released from that bottle.

You know whats fucked up is that the biggest social media company has car tracking around its HQ and it reports lic plates back to the municipal city government...

emodendroket 5 years ago | |

It doesn't sound like you're in a very strong position to condemn them, then.

Arrath 5 years ago | | |

What better way to open your eyes than be inside the belly of the beast?

People can grow and have regrets.

LinuxBender 5 years ago |

Probably any modern car? OBD-3 was supposed to have a small GSM transceiver in it to relay GPS location, smog emission, speed, allow remote engine-shut-off, misc other things and that was starting to be deployed in 2012 on some cars but then put on hold for privacy issues. My old vehicle does not emit any RF and is OBD-2. Are there any car hackers on here that have hypothetically speaking modded the OBD-3 transceiver modules? i.e. hypothetically spoofed speed, emissions, location. I can't even find a list of manufacturers that have implemented this. SEMA were the group leading the effort.

aaron695 5 years ago |

I assume they use phone data to do this.

If you were tricky you could work out which car a phone was in from the fingerprinting accelerometer data and other things.

But I suspect they are mostly exaggerating.

karinakarina 5 years ago | |

I'm wondering how they're getting access to data from cars all over the world "except Cuba and North Korea."

Does one database actually exist or are they tapping in from a number of sources. It all feels a little too sci-fi.

aaron695 5 years ago | | |

Well, it has to be advertising on apps on a phone. You need more than the cell towers from the phone, if you could get them.

Cuba and North Korea have no traffic layer on Google maps. But there's a few other that don't as well like Yemen and South Korea which is interesting. But I remember watching the protests in Iran on Google maps, which does have the layer.

This would be useful, matching traffic speed to user speed would help with motos and bikes. Other countries might be on Waze or similar.

Or it might only be legal issues their end dealing with data from those countries.

https://developers.google.com/maps/coverage

Maybe they are lying or maybe it's all crappy fleet cars. Which no one would care about, until after they buy the access I guess.

Ulysses actually say what the headline claims "Nearly Any Car in Real-Time" - https://strangesounds.org/2021/03/car-location-gps-privacy-d...

tolbish 5 years ago | |

> Vehicle location data is transmitted on a constant and near real time basis while the vehicle is operating

So they are obtaining it from connected cars.

PhantomGremlin 5 years ago |

Article doesn't mention license plate readers, which are quite common nowadays.

Also, in addition to plates, wouldn't it be possible to monitor cellphone metadata in real time? Every phone is constantly checking into a base station, whether it is currently in use or not.

After a while it would be easy to build up a very useful database that not only kept track of cars but also kept track of the cellphones associated with those cars.

I can't see how to prevent any of this from happening.

For all I know, Homeland Security already does all this. About the only thing keeping them from doing it is that some external contractor would probably charge them $billions to design and integrate this, and maybe they just haven't spent the money yet.