this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
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License Plate Cameras Will Soon Track Phones, Wearables, Infotainment, and Even Your Pets (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 1 day ago by LuminousLuddite@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
87 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] Ebby@lemmy.ssba.com 23 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I'd be a shame if someone hid an ESP32 nearby randomly broadcasting previously detected MAC addresses.

[–] NauticalNoodle@lemmy.ml 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Thinking in terms of database management systems I would think these systems collect enough unique info that they probably can use 'composite-keys' to sort through collected content. If thats the case then they can probably filter out all of those fake MAC addresses with relative ease, but I like where your head is at.

[–] Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

they're feeding them through LLMs and putting them in a database. maybe they're sanitizing their inputs, maybe not.

[–] green_goglin@thelemmy.club 3 points 12 hours ago

Narrator: “They weren’t”

[–] batmaniam@lemmy.world 9 points 23 hours ago

Despite doing an awful lot with ESP32s, Home assistant, and a bunch of LoRa stuff, I know very little about BLE. Would it be possible for folks to voluntarily add their MAC to a data base on gitlab, and have a ESP32 program that:

  1. Spammed out whatever the max reasonable number of random entries from that database is
  2. Updated it every-time it was on a specified WiFi So that every time I drove by one of these, not only do I look like a spacehulk of TPS, headphones, cars and cellphones, but I'm specifically helping someone appear somewhere not their location as well?