Flock, and other ALPR companies like Axon, Motorola, and Verkada have been adding capabilities to gather signals from airpods, smart watches, fitness trackers, even toll lane passes.
There were allegations too about TPMS. That is harder, b/c TPMS do not xmit actively. The power comes only from reflecting a received RF, so it is weak. But it may not be impossible. The car itself gets the signals like that, tho shorter range. There may be a larger antenna on the roadside than your car uses, to capture weaker signals. Unclear if it’s possible. But unclear it isn’t!
TPMS started in 1980s. It didn’t get real widespread until 2000s. But even “older” cars, safe from online telematics, still may have TPMS. If there is any way for Flock and the rest to use it as a fingerprint, they will. TPMS has a unique ID.
So I started looking. Can TPMS be removed at home? Answer is, kinda. It’s a little hard without special tire equipment, and it may fuck up the tire balance. A shop can do it, but IDK if they are legally allowed to.
But would that do anything for you? TBH I doubt it helps much. The ALPRs use so many techniques. Plates, ofc. Also scratches. Dents. Bumper stickers. Trailer hitches. Ski racks. Window stickers and passes. Any distinguishing aspect of the vehicle. There are even rumors they can use FR on the driver, but IDK if that has been substantiated. So TPMS delete maybe not worth the squeeze.
Even avoiding ALL emissions, portable devices and TPMS, the ALPR can still ID you in enough other ways. Optical side harder to defeat than radio side.
Once, we could drive without private companies recording everywhere we go. We could even travel from state to state. No papers.
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Tire pressure monitoring sensors don’t transmit continually. It probably varies from one manufacturer to another, but it isn’t enough that a fixed camera could reliably catch them transmitting. They have a battery, and the accuracy has to be balanced with life span. The older systems you mentioned mostly used things like ABS sensors to sense tire inflation issues. No wireless signals with them.
I not familiar with high end vehicles, maybe jaguars etc are different but an average person will have or did have what I mentioned for the most part.
Tech changes, maybe next year we get wifi TPMS 🫤
I’m not familiar enough with TPMS specifically, but with the general technology as I have some experience with older security card technologies that use the same techniques. There are a few issues with trying to do this at long range (even a few yards).
First you’d need extremely sensitive transceivers that would be difficult to protect from interference.
Second, it would require enough power to get the transmitter to send the signal far enough to be read. This has multiple problems. One is that, depending on the frequencies involved, you may end up creating a noticeable amount of heat or causing cancer if exposed to it for a significant amount of time. This might be more problematic for pedestrians and animals who stand between the transceiver and the cars for too long.
Next is time, again not too familiar with the specifics of TPMS, but in similar tech, it would require power to be supplied by the transceiver for sometimes as much as a half a second or so. A moving car might not be in the target zone long enough to power up the TPMS, especially on faster moving roads and highways.
What they might be able to do to mitigate this is to convince cities to embed the transceivers in the road itself or in curbs or something closer to the car. And if done at stop signs and traffic lights it would mitigate any time based issues. Though they might need to keep then far enough from any of the coils they install for traffic monitoring and triggering traffic lights. Not sure how much interference those would cause for this approach.
Again, I could be totally off and TPMS might not have these issues. But if we’re talking cars from the 80s, then I wouldn’t be surprised if they had some of these issues.
Good thoughts, tyvm. That all make sense to me. I am far from an expert too. But I believe you are right, it would require more xmit power from the ALPR, and people would detect it easly with an RF detector.
You succeeded in changing my guess, towards less likely they are harvesting TPMS ids.
difficult to protect from interference
That’s a fun idea. Some kinds of RF jamming are very illegal and will get the FCC (*) all up in your business, like that guy running a cell phone jammer from his car a while back. But obv it’s legal to xmit on wifi type frequences. Everybody’s wifi AP does that. I’m sure there are power limits and stuff. But maybe what’s legal, would still be enough to frustrate a Flock portable device scan for gizmos using those freqs.
If you’re the only one doing it, you’d stick out like a sore thumb. But if 1 in 4 cars were doing it…
NAL so I can’t comment on legality there. Or even on the practicality. But it does make me wonder.
(*) Or your country’s equivalent, the ppl who regulate the radio spectrum.
