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I mean- anything that communicates wirelessly could be used to track an owner/user of a thing… Is it likely? No, but is it possible someone puts radios under the pavement at intersections to log TPMS sensors? Sure- fuck now I’m messing with my own head. Never mind.
It seems easier to set up a camera and scan the license plate for identification instead of using radios for logging TPMS sensors.
Would it be an advantage to identify a car by logging the TPMS sensors?
It would certainly be of interest to know the “where” and “when” of where someone is - to FLOCK or the government. I don’t like where this is going in my brain.
Oh, I meant what the advantage would be of tracking TPMS sensors instead of using a camera to read the license plate. I can see the advantage of tracking people.
Ah. My bad. Outside of “stolen plate” I don’t know what reason could be.
Your license plate can also be used to track you
They mention this in the article. The difference is that since the tire sensor sends out an RF signal, direct line of sight isn’t necessary. You could throw a tracker up on a roof and grab signals from a block over.
The missing part may be tying that signal to a specific car, but say your car gets pulled over - they could read your tires’ sensor ID and compare it to where they captured it and bam! Now you’re fucked.
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.
True, though CCTV or Closed Circuit Television used to be “fully local” and “closed”. Tapes and recordings were only available or accessible to the property or person in most situations being recorded over older recordings.
Newer tech now is interconnected with companies trying to infer extra information from full databases of recordings from multiple different locations all around a town or city, or state.
CCTV used to be like a security guard sitting on a lawn chair. Where modern security cameras/systems are like having a personal tail following you all day and night.
Ha, they’ll have to install working sensors on mine first 😈
Yeah, I dont have any, nice try
Any car or any tire?
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.
Mitsubishi ASX.
Brutal. I guess you can always swap the tires yourself and then stop by a tire shop and ask them to reprogram it. I feel for you.
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.
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 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.
If only there was some kind of way to periodically check tire pressures.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that it was legally mandated is good evidence that it is [necessary].
P1 If X is legally mandated then that is good evidence that X is necessary.
P2 Slavery is legally mandated (in the USA through prison labour)
C1 There is good evidence slavery is necessary.
P3 [insert other silly/abhorrent thing here is legally mandated: ICE in general, state murder…] is good evidence that [ICE, state murder, are necessary
C2 There is good evidence silly/abhorrent thing is necessary.
Personally I’d reject P1, the law isn’t an arbitrator of mortality, or truth. Due to C2 I’d side eye anyone who says it is.
Legal != effective or ethical, that is an unbelievably stupid argument for TPMS.
LOL who said anything about ethics? This is an unbelievably stupid response.
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.
What a shockingly wrong take. TPMS is a convenience, not a safety measure, have properly inflated tires is. And, anyone who properly maintains their car, doesn’t need it
And, it’s not legally mandated everywhere, even if it is for you.
What an incredibly bad take. Indeed, having properly inflated tires is a safety issue. How do you know if they’re properly inflated? Are you checking them every 3 minutes while driving? Because TPMS is…
Because I am not a complete fucking idiot.
If you truly believe that nonsense you are spewing, your probably shouldn’t be driving. You are unaware of the operational aspects of your vehicle and are a danger to the people around you.
Because I am not a complete fucking idiot.
Mmmmmm
You are unaware of the operational aspects of your vehicle and are a danger to the people around you.
WTF is a “operational aspect”?
Because I was bored
GIDAS data
https://www.ircobi.org/wordpress/downloads/irc0111/2009/Session2/2_3.pdf
It concludes that even if you increased grip, which includes tire pressure variance, by 15%, it would only represent a reduction of 2% of road related fatalities, which is actually within the margin of error.
While 2% sounds like a lot, GIDAS also shows that tire failures account for less than 1% of road accidents causing death.
So you’re spending $300 to $500 on a new car for a TPMS which reduces the probability of accidental death by 0.02%.
And fun fact, most tire related accidents are actually from tread depth, not low pressure, and TPMS will do fuck all to tell you your tread depth is low.
It concludes that even if you increased grip
It’s nothing to do with grip. In fact, a lower tire pressure will actually increase grip.
tire failures account for less than 1% of road accidents causing death.
Oh well if no one died it must not be a safety issue?
So you’re spending $300 to $500 on a new car for a TPMS
Uhhh nope, it comes with the car…
And fun fact, most tire related accidents are actually from tread depth, not low pressure
So we’re just going to ignore it as a safety issue because it’s not a main cause of collisions?
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.
I am suspicious of that being the motivation behind this.
You clearly need a TPMS if you aren’t smart enough to detect when your car pulls to one side, drags, or makes a loud FWAPFWAPFWAP sound.
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.
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.
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’.
There aren’t 50 states with mandatory safety inspections, try educating yourself before making nonsense arguments.
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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.
Do you drive around with no license plate on your car, too?
you can in Ontario, police stopped giving a fuck. Most plates are illegible and some people tape then up to avoid video tolls.
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.
I’m honestly not trying to be defeatist, I just want to convey how idiotic of a concern this is. You sensor id needs to be tied to the car somehow for it to be remotely useful, never mind the atrocious reception of them in the first place it’s just a non issue. And if u reprogram sensor ids, how will it know what vehicle just went by its radar? It would also need a camera to tie the plate or something else which means your already being surveyed. The concern that ur TPMS is going to be used to track you is just so idiotic I cannot fathom the stupidity of telling people to go out and remove their pressure sensors. Hopefully u don’t own any vehicle made after 2002 cuz good Lord when you find out about key transponders and radio frequency security keys ! Good luck deleting your immobilizer 😂😂😂
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.
Survivorship bias
That is actually surprising, given people.
I worked at a car repair shop when I was younger. I agree that it’s not most (as in > 50%) but the number of people who knowingly drive very unsafe vehicles is bigger than you’d think.
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 $200 and take an extra hour or two”.
State inspections are a racket. This is coming from a state inspector. Waste of time and money! I only got certified so I can inspect my own and wife’s vehicles. Well that and it’s invaluable at work but shit if your determined to drive an unroadworthy POS the lack of a sticker on ur windshield and the possibility u MIGHT get a 50$ 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.
Well crap, that’s not a cheap solution but I’m glad you commented because I didn’t know these Autel sensors existed and that you could reprogram them. I mean, this threat is semi hypothetical right now (not like it’s been used in the wild by authorities or anything) but one day it might be. Continual reprogramming would be a valid solution.
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.
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.
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Theres a spy device in your pocket.
People that care about that have already controlled for that to the degree of their concern and/or ability. This is now one more door that needs to be locked.
Its good to remind people of the various ways they could be tracked as you have done, but I prefer to try to frame these challenges in ways that encourage taking whatever steps we can toward privacy goals, rather than give up and figuratively lay down and die.
I don’t think its productive to think in terms that diminish people’s efforts to try to maintain their privacy as best they can.
O no. And this whole time I’ve been mailing my phone to my destination every time I have to drive somewhere so they can’t track me!
The bastards!
Wait till you see how many Bluetooth devices still do this. Or better yet, Ant+.
All these “unintentional” tracking devices begin to look intentional.
Build a large enough catalogue of bulk data and anything can be used to track you.
We bought “It’s just so we can catch the terrorists!” hook, line, and sinker post-9/11.
But when “terrorism” is redefined as “making people in power upset,” we’re in big trouble.
So don’t say anything rude about Donald Trump or the FBI will seek you out:
I never bought it, I was raising immortal hell then. But as a collective, yes we did, and as a collective, we’re sitting around moaning instead of doing something, anything, effective.
True, but your implication that I’m not doing enough while I’m sitting here complaining is just as well-served to the mirror.
Lol
Apologies - didn’t realize I was talking to someone who has bouts of nihilism mixed in with their political activism like rocks in a salad.
Enjoy the block!
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.
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.
You can transmit without a modem.
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.
Camera has to have LOS to the car’s license plate, it’s got a limited field of view, it’s blocked or obscured by bad weather and other objects. You need to have some compute power with the camera to run the OCR to get the LP number from the image. People can easily (although not legally) switch their plates up.
Meanwhile, reading the radio signals can be done with rather small, innocuous looking hardware, it can capture many signals at once and even capture them through objects, without LOS to the TPMS, and in all kinds of weather.
Each method has it’s advantages and disadvantages, and it would be foolish to ignore one simply because it does not have the same capabilities as the other.
Except it isn’t, because you have to access the data of that GPS receiver somehow.
I’m so fed up with people having this misconception that GPS somehow on its own exfiltrates one’s position. It doesn’t. You’re literally just using a pre-defined arrangement of satellites that broadcast their IDs to establish location. It’s entirely local because GPS signal is only received by people.
So no, just by having GPS, you can’t be found by anyone. Not even governments or the CIA.
Now, if that GPS receiver feeds into a smart system that is exposed to the internet… that is a different topic as there’s tons of ways to have apps preinstalled and pre-approved that can read the GPS receiver data and send it off to a third party. It can even be built into the OS.
However, permanently internet connected cars aren’t that widespread even today - most actually tend to rely on the driver’s phone and runs a very thin layer of smart stuff that simply enables the phone to use the car dashboard as a terminal.
Oh wow, even more reasons to hold onto my old but not enshITtified baby!
My Wi-Fi also logs all the cars that pass that have built in WiFi. Kind of crazy how many ways cars can be tracked.
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.
I’m tired, boss.
Me too.
Hey, that’s my line.
Exhausted.
