A new kind of license-plate-reading camera will also scrape the smart devices you take with you, and wrap all that data in a nice little bow for law enforcement and the government.

Defense contractor Leonardo is promoting a new technology called SignalTrace that will package plate cameras with sensors that can scrape unique identifiers tied to your smart devices and make that data available to law enforcement.

Police, border security, and other government agencies already comprise Leonardo’s customer base, and with this technology, those clients seek to correlate footage from these cameras to phones, tablets, wearables, AirTags, and, naturally, the electronics inside cars themselves.

If SignalTrace can pick up your Bluetooth headphones, you can be sure it’ll also be looking out for your vehicle’s 5G hotspot, infotainment system, and even its tire pressure monitoring sensors. The company includes pet microchips as a potential entry point to tracking.

    • Warl0k3@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 day ago

      For unimplanted tags of unspecified size sure it’s technically possible to do, but I’ll let the article summarize why this is blatant marketing hype:

      The ideal lab setup often fails miserably once you mount the reader near a gate or machine frame.

      It’s worth saying: 1 meter is an ambitious goal for 125kHz. LF systems are intentionally short-range to prevent cross-talk. If you truly need 1-meter coverage, sometimes the real solution isn’t to push more current — it’s to rethink geometry, use multi-coil zones, or explore hybrid systems (LF for identity, HF/UHF for distance).

      and then mention that the interference from the dermis vastly reduces the useful range of the tags, and that the article doesn’t actually specify what type of tag they’re designing for (or if it’s using a set orientation…).