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Comment by EricE | Hacker News Reader

Time to go back to a non-connected Garmin GPS while in the car and slip my phone into a mesh bag when not in use :(

So glad I don't own a newer car with a cellular modem built into it. Hope I can die and be buried with my current "dumb" cards.

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You better rip out your TPMS since those can be tracked. Same with anything that has bluetooth since those are widely tracked on highways for monitoring traffic flows. Oh and license plate readers, not sure how you block those. Can you live a cash only life as well since credit cards are obviously tracked. Do you own a home? Is it in your name or did you set up an LLC to purchase it? I'm not trying to be a jerk, just that I've had the same thoughts as you and just realized it's impossible.

"The enemy of good is perfect".

There are acceptable steps to take in order to remove yourself and some of your data from the things you disagree with, but just because you can't reach step 10 right now, doesn't mean you should take step 1.

It's possible, just difficult. License plates happen to be incredibly susceptible to getting muddy.

In a world where being the wrong kind of skin colour can consistently get you pulled over and harassed for a 'broken tail light' and 'smelling weed in the car', it takes a lot of social privilege to think that driving around with an unreadable license plate is a workable solution.

Come to New York City where every 3rd car on the road has an illegal paper license plate or no license plate at all and then get back to me about "social privilege".

TPMS is fairly difficult to track. You need to be either very close (inches/feet) or have a very high gain antenna (which means you have to aim it, can't get signals from every direction) plus they don't transmit continuously.

I recommend getting a rtl-sdr and playing around with rtl_433. It will probably change your mind about needing to be very close to things.

Even with the small antenna these devices come with, I can pickup TPMS signals from the cars on the nearby streets, and that's with the antenna indoors.

Also, only travel on very overcast days.

> Hope I can die and be buried with my current "dumb" cards.

There are a lot of ways to satisfy your hope, many of which I suspect you would consider suboptimal. I hope manifestation doesn’t work.

If you use an android, you can set it so that it does location just off GPS which is a lot less precise and doesn't seem to update as often. The other day I went downtown for a ballgame, sushi after, and then home, and the only place it picked me up for the day was the light rail station when I bought my ticket early that afternoon

In most of the world, CCTV is gaining facial and number plate recognition so that might not save you.

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