Texas Considers Putting RFID Tags in All Cars

An anonymous reader submits "In section 601.507 of Texas HB 2893, the Texas Legislature is considering replacing all vehicle inspection stickers with RFID tags. The legislation also makes provision for the government to use the devices for insurance enforcement. The bill contains limited privacy provisions, but does not seem to exclude other law enforcement usage."

Comments

Re:Do you have OnStar?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

OnStar equipment includes a phone.. Could somebody record what you are doing without you knowing? I'd bet it is possible.

More than possible, it has already been done. The FBI got the Mercedes equivalent of On-Star to route a suspect's telemetry to them first. They remotely turned on the "phone" and listened to all the conversations in the car.

We know about it because Mercedes took the FBI to court over it after the monitoring had extended for more than a month. Mercedes's problem with it was that if there was a real emergency, the FBI's wiretap prevented normal emergency services from being provided to the car owner who had paid for them.

The courts ruled in favor of Mercedes, without addressing the privacy issues at all, instead basing their opinion pretty much on the issue of the wiretap interefering with normal usage.

Here's an article that summarizes it pretty well. The part they missed is that the car vendor in question was Mercedes. I read in a different article at the time that while the company's name was sealed or otherwise not made public, the lawyer for the auto company in the suit was public knowledge and it was also public knowledge that his firm primarily worked for Mercedes with few, if any, other auto manufacturer clients. Thus the inference to Mercedes.