Company Will Add Phone, AirPod, and Smartwatch Trackers to ALPRs

I was in the space 10 years ago with a product. Primarily Bluetooth, later BLE and WiFi. At that time most consumer devices were constantly discoverable. About 3-5% of traffic would have a disoverable MAC. These days not so many. iPhones never are discoverable unless you are in pairing mode. BLE broadcasts beacons much more consistently and generates a lot of data to filter, but they also change MACs.

Most WiFi chipsets use hardware based MAC layer, so promiscuous monitoring / sniffing is not possible on virtually every embedded module. There were a few chipsets, known as SoftMAC where linux drivers did the MAC layer, in which you could truly sniff the air for all traffic and capture a whole lot of MAC addresses. That was much more useful, but requires more CPU and specific older hardware. If you have a permanent power source like in a ALPR that isn't as much of a concern. I don't know of any companies that really did this though. Almost all our competitors used solutions that only supported the usual device discovery, which relies on BT being discoverable, or AP mode WiFi in order to track a MAC address. It's really easy to market though, it sounds great on paper. In practice the results are less than stellar and with time got even worse as vendors stopped being discoverable by default, and handsets started using used dynamic MAC addresses

Program your flipper0 to record all wireless identifications for a few weeks. hook broadcaster to amplifier and attach to your car playing all the time. Every time you drive by one of these, it'll look like a parade just went by.

Probably do the same thing when you go into retail stores. just flood the place with every possible identification.

Maybe an easier solution is just write something that spoofs hundreds of fake ids and sends them out constantly where ever you go; bonus points if you can create IDs that can break the devices when they try to parse it.

This is essentially a wiretap.

It's illegal in most states to place a listening device in public that captures private conversations, this is basically no different.

According to the graphic, all RFID/NFC tags including pet microchips and your company badge will be associated with you too.

I can remember in the late 1990's Berkeley Public Library was considering adding RFID tags to the books as asset tags. The public push-back was significant and surprising at the time. Freedom-loving library patrons were concerned about nefarious tracking. Proponents of the new tags thought that the concept of tracking people or the books they read was rooted in paranoia.

Isn't it not really possible to uniquely identify most modern bluetooth devices this way? Specifically to prevent things like this.

Unless they're hoping my AirPods are in pairing mode all of the time and they're going to track the name "mikeocool's AirPods."

This feels illegal. If it's not, it probably should be.

Privacy is no more if that is true

Now that I think of it, I'd be surprised if there aren't a few lists of this kind already made by an agency/company or two.

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