It is, messages are signed by a certificate rotated every 5 minutes.
So for 5 minutes you know precisely which car it is and then when the changeover happens you just look for which certificate has disappeared and which has newly appeared and do some fuzzy matching based on position and heading. That is not remotely anonymous.
So anyone who can already follow a car can continue to follow a car. You're aware that cars have a globally unique identifier painted on the outside already, yes? And that identifier never changes and is trivially tied to the owners identity? Let's try to maintain some perspective.
The VIN isn't transmitted wirelessly though. The article mentions that it is possible to build antennas that can extend the reception range by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, so 300m (the proposed design range) may be stalked from as far away as 30km (2 orders of magnitude) or even more.
Place strategically a few of these antennas and you can monitor a huge area.
It seems as anonymous as current highway usage and vision. You can see a car while they are within eye-sight. In this proposal, your car can receive data about the other car while they are within about 300m. Once gone they are gone. I'm not seeing the leap to tracking and the loss of anonymity.
When using a better receiving antenna and demodulators and stuff and extending the range to 3000m, maybe you start to see the problem? It's 300m minimum for cars to see each other, which presumably is intended to work with reasonably cheap receivers. Chances are you can put one somewhat more advanced receiver somewhere in an average city and be able to track all vehicle movements.
Comments
The proposed message format isn't including car identity, at least that I can tell.
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p...
Without identity, how is this a massive invasion of privacy on the order of Google and Facebook?
It is, messages are signed by a certificate rotated every 5 minutes.
So for 5 minutes you know precisely which car it is and then when the changeover happens you just look for which certificate has disappeared and which has newly appeared and do some fuzzy matching based on position and heading. That is not remotely anonymous.
So anyone who can already follow a car can continue to follow a car. You're aware that cars have a globally unique identifier painted on the outside already, yes? And that identifier never changes and is trivially tied to the owners identity? Let's try to maintain some perspective.
The VIN isn't transmitted wirelessly though. The article mentions that it is possible to build antennas that can extend the reception range by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, so 300m (the proposed design range) may be stalked from as far away as 30km (2 orders of magnitude) or even more.
Place strategically a few of these antennas and you can monitor a huge area.
License plate + state = GUID.
Did you respond to the wrong comment? I don't think the parent commenter is debating that a license plate identifies a vehicle.
Nope. I said GUID, they said VIN, I was clarifying that I was talking about the license plate not the VIN.
It seems as anonymous as current highway usage and vision. You can see a car while they are within eye-sight. In this proposal, your car can receive data about the other car while they are within about 300m. Once gone they are gone. I'm not seeing the leap to tracking and the loss of anonymity.
When using a better receiving antenna and demodulators and stuff and extending the range to 3000m, maybe you start to see the problem? It's 300m minimum for cars to see each other, which presumably is intended to work with reasonably cheap receivers. Chances are you can put one somewhat more advanced receiver somewhere in an average city and be able to track all vehicle movements.