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Comment by aunty_helen | Hacker News Reader

What a tight rope this author has to walk. You want commute suggestions but you don’t want google to know where you live or work?

I’ll bat for google on this one, the value I get from Gmaps vs the value they get from my data seems like a fair exchange.

Also PSA, if you use Bluetooth with your car, your city transport department is tracking you. Best of luck opting out of that or even finding who to contact.

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> Also PSA, if you use Bluetooth with your car, your city transport department is tracking you. Best of luck opting out of that or even finding who to contact.

Can you say more about this? I've never heard of it.

Houston does it. They have bluetooth trackers on all the highways. They use it for determining congestion based on how often you can ping the same address. Keeps pinging? Gridlock. Pings once, traffic moving.

I wander if anyone has any proof it's being stored for future use or used for anything but general traffic data.

Not sure what they’re pointing to, but TPMS tracking is possible as well.

https://youtu.be/TDYoo7TGNcw

Sure, here's the one I've had experience with: https://addinsight.com.au/

They put powerful bluetooth sensors on poles or in roadside cabinets. They're pretty cheap to deploy so have become widely used.

Pretty much if you have two bluetooth devices talking to each other, you can be tracked by your bluetooth mac address. (Same as wifi networks and sniffing with wireshark etc)

Or if you have a device pinging with a non-random mac (ie your car).

If you've got an iphone and it's not actively being used, you get a random mac, no problems.

Here is a slide deck from DEFCON on it: https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2022/DEF%20CON%2022%20pre...

you don’t even need bluetooth. there’s license plate readers on all highways which feed into traffic indicators on apps or those road signs that say how many minutes away places are

License plate readers are costly and need to be positioned with a good field of view etc.

Bluetooth sensors are more widely used, you've just never noticed them.

Also, the highway congestion is most likely done with magnetic inductance loops.

But the point is that Apple Maps also has the commute suggestions without the privacy cost

As long as you're using a cellular network, you're trackable, no? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFns39RXPrU

Maybe, I don’t know, but it doesn’t mean we should just give up on protecting our data everywhere else.

A GPS or Bluetooth signal would be far more precise as a mass surveillance tool, so let’s not give that up

Not being tracked in addition by an advertising company is worth something to me.

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