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Comment by uyzstvqs | Hacker News Reader

The site is definitely lacking. It's half in German, half in English.

The concept is that there is this protocol called ITS-G5, which is a European profile of 802.11p. Vehicles and traffic infrastructure can transmit telemetry on 5 GHz. Other vehicles and traffic infrastructure can use it for situational awareness.

This website collects that data using local receivers and aggregates it onto a map, similar to what website like ADSB-Exchange do with ADS-B.

What is concerning is that vehicles appear to broadcast a MAC address. Does this mean that ITS-G5, 802.11p, and C-ITS could be used for persistent tracking?

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Reading the translation of the talk, public transport vehicles have a persistent MAC but for private cars the MAC address changes every 15 minutes.

That still doesn't seem very private.

Particularly anywhere rural or off the beaten path

You wouln‘t really have the kind if hardware there. The communication relies on a multi hop mesh that would‘t work anywhere without sufficient coverage.

You do know you have a unique ID displayed on a big tab on the vehicle, right?

And I don’t want to give Flock more OTA capabilities!

Even our tires blast out IDs.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/exploring-the-privacy-risks-of-tire-...

For a vehicle with a highly visible unique identifier on the front and rear? In my country basically every private carpark has ANPR cameras, the tech is dirt cheap now.

It's much cheaper to deploy a dense network of cheap, covert radio loggers.

As discussed in the video they are not resetting the packet sequence number though, making it easy to match them with the other data transmitted.

> What is concerning is that vehicles appear to broadcast a MAC address.

Somewhat related: 'Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you': https://networks.imdea.org/your-cars-tire-sensors-could-be-u...

This should be a top level comment as it has a ton of useful info and can be voted to the top.

What about the traffic lights on the map do they also have transmitters?

Yes, they also have transmitters. The traffic lights send out MAPEM and SPATEM messages. They describe the layout of the lanes at the intersection as well as the red/green phase timings of the signal.

In Graz, the city where the authors live, there are 165 of such signals planned.

Did they re invent APRS?

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