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Comment on Killing car privacy by federal mandateparent

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It sounds like most of the security/privacy objections revolve around the ID. If the purpose is safety, why even bother to broadcast an ID? All you need to know for safety purposes is that a large hunk of metal and glass at distance D is approaching or receding at velocity V and angle theta.

Would eliminating the ID component of the proposal satisfy the critics?

Would eliminating the ID component of the proposal satisfy the critics?

I'm not a critic and I have no idea.

As to the rest, just about everything we do in interaction has an ID. This comment will have an ID. I as a hacker news user will have an ID. My cellphone and its sim card both have id's. My google account somewhere has an ID. These are just the requirements of data persistence.

As to this system for cars, in humans we call this object permanence. We track things with our eyes and maintain that a thing we were aware of has moved to a new location. Removing IDs seems to remove this fundamental notion of how we think. "Car x was here but now is here" seems like we have knowledge of the scene; there was 3400 pounds going 72 mph to the left of us earlier, now there's 3200 pounds going 71 mph in front of us. How many cars are in this scene? Did a care move in front of you and brake or have you encountered another car and lost track of the first one?

And from the proposal, > Finally, the Temporary ID is a fourbyte string array randomly-generated number that allows a receiving device to associate messages sent from the same device together.

So its a random number generated every five minutes and that "[a]dditional research is being conducted to further investigate the ability or limitation of the five minute time period to mitigate the potential for tracking and protect privacy".

How many cars are in this scene? Did a care move in front of you and brake or have you encountered another car and lost track of the first one?

The updates are sent at 10 per second, aren't they? The basic concept of inertia will let you keep track of what cars are around you for collision-avoidance and even ad-hoc communication purposes. A car simply can't warp in or out at timescales faster than that.

You don't need to know that the cars you're tracking are the same ones you were tracking five minutes ago. There's no safety application for an ID feature.

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