Malaysia to Use RFID Number Plates Next Year

durianwool wrote in with a story about Malaysia's plans to introduce RFID number plates. It reads: "'The first thing thieves do after a car theft is change the registration plates,' Road Transport Department Director-General Ahmad Mustapha was quoted as saying. The microchips, using radio frequency identification technology, will be fixed into the number plates and can transmit data at a range of up to 100 meters (yards), the report said. They will have a battery life of 10 years, it said. "

Comments

Now the second thing..

[Yetihehe]

will be to fry, change or overwrite RFID tag

Re:Now the second thing..

[arivanov]

And how exactly are you going to cross a road toll or a police checkpoint?

This is one of the few possible use of RFID which make sense. Your number plate is out in plain sight anyway, it is also visible at the same or greater distance as the reader range. So there is no privacy implication here. In fact many privately run road toll systems already use this tech and this is simply an extension to cover the entire country.

Compared to the alternatives like Ken Livingston's London CCTV camera recognition and the UK dept of tranport "GPS in every car" scheme this is considerably less privacy invasive and much much cheaper. In fact - I would prefer this to them any day (especially to the GPS in every car idea).

Re:Now the second thing..

[Sancho]

In a situation like this, you'd eventually see a complete turnover of traffic laws. Traffic analysts have shown that without speeders, congestion is unbelievable (or more accurately, if everyone is going the same speed, the congestion is terrible). Because so many people are willing to go the speed limit, and a few people drive below and above it, traffic flow is reasonable. Speeders only speed because there is a low chance of being caught.

With automatic tracking/ticketing of speeders, beyond the obvious problem of loaning your car to someone, you'll see the roads getting clogged constantly. Something will have to be done to alleviate the problem, and that something will either be having personal speed limits (you can drive faster if you pass a safety test), greater public transportation to reduce the cars on the road (I'm all for this--there's virtually none in my state), bigger roads (ug), or a reversal to manually tracked speeding.

I don't get it.

[shmlco]

I don't get it. The first thing they do is change the plates... so we're going to put tags into the plates???