Slashdot Mirror
China's Surveillance State Will Soon Track Cars (wsj.com)
China is establishing an electronic identification system to track cars nationwide, according to a report on WSJ, which cites records and people briefed on the matter. From a report: Under the plan being rolled out July 1, a radio-frequency identification chip for vehicle tracking will be installed on cars when they are registered. Compliance will be voluntary this year but will be made mandatory for new vehicles at the start of 2019, the people said. Authorities have described the plan as a means to improve public security and to help ease worsening traffic congestion, documents show, a major concern in many Chinese cities partly because clogged roads contribute to air pollution. But such a system, implemented in the world's biggest automotive market, with sales of nearly 30 million vehicles a year, will also vastly expand China's surveillance network, experts say. That network already includes widespread use of security cameras, facial recognition technology and internet monitoring.
US has EZ-Pass, which is a defacto tracking system, even if not originally designed as such.
China already has nationwide numberplate scanning network
than the GPS enabled " digital " license plate California wants to roll out other than the different spin put on it.
China does it = Evil Surveillance State :|
California does it = No way we'll ever use it for nefarious purposes ! We pinky swear ! We're the good guys !
This is non-news, they are already have license plate scanners every few blocks in my tier-88 city. They are just changing the method of scanning. I have no problems with it, even as a foreigner, I feel safer here than in any other country I have traveled to.
I don't think this is very far from EZPass or the Automatic License Readers in the USA.
You've caught up to the level of oppression^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsecurity we in the UK have had for some time:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Requiem for the American Dream
This is rich. China's surveillance state. How about the UK with ANPR - not just the UK, there are a lot of placed, even here in Canada, with ANPR now but not like the UK has. How about the NSA tapping into every internet backbone in the world? The Five Eyes have more domestic surveillance than China will ever have.
Stories like this make me angry. Not because I think of China as being any better, but because people who write these kind of headlines are just so willfully ignorant it makes my teeth itch. We (read every resident of a Western democracy) have been living in the kind of a surveillance state for the last decade as would have given the head of the KGB at the height of the Soviet Union an absolute erection.
Roll the dice, thats who you get as ruler. Trump was the dead mans hand...
[($)]
If this is a built-in chip as opposed to a magnetic device stuck in your wheel well, you can't just stroll out of the El Pollo Loco after lunch, fish out the device from your car, and stick it onto an adjacent touristmobile to throw your pursuers off the track.
my 2013 chrysler has a cell modem in it which is always receiving traffic updates and weather
my 2008 gmc had on star.
not to mention the personal trackers we carry everywhere (cell phones)
privacy is dead but people hardly recognize it
parallel construction keeps the depths they track us masked
for the same reason I want Medicare for All I'd like to see toll roads go away. Some things should just be paid for by civilization as a whole. China isn't oppressing these people for shits and giggles. They're doing it because they've got massive wealth inequality and this is how you maintain a society when you've got lots of folks who lack food security and shelter. The reason you guarantee a decent quality of life is because you can't be free when somebody controls your access to food, shelter, healthcare, education & transportation. The latter being needed to access to former. Until then you're a weeks meals or a harsh winter away from doing whatever the folks in charge of the money say.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The UK had its ring of steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... using tracking in/out of a city in the early/mid 1990's
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Already there in the US. In the NYC area, cross a bridge ? EZ pass and photos. Use most highways ? EZ pass readers "for statistical tracking". Lose your 95 yo Grandparent and they have a car ? "Elderly male missing, White Nissan Sentra, LPR hit on plate at XX location two hours ago".
The US is ALSO pushing out RFID/Active license plate systems as well, but this tech has been defacto available in the US across private systems for 10-30 years now. GM's OnStar effectively allows this via Cell Tower/Satellite tracking. Honda/Toyota/BMW/Mercedes/etc each have their own implementation of this for at least the last 10 years. Furthermore there are the pilot electronic license plate systems across multiple states (as mentioned above, California has those GPS plates available voluntarily.) *PLUS* as was reported in another Slashdot post within the past few weeks: The US has private contractors providing license plate reading cameras at many intersections in addition to the previous red light cameras, which combined with cell phone tracking allows reasonably comprehensive tracking of all citizens in the US not actively attempting to avoid the surveillance. Should any of those people reach a point where they want/need to avoid said surveillance, they will already be easy to catch, because basically every action they have ever taken, or might be inferred to take will be available via data mining of their past travels.
I used to be worried about China showing the way for the US. But instead the US has been leading china in citizen surveillance technology for many years now.
By 2030.
Thanks for all of your stories over the years, but it looks as if it is time to leave this website forever. Thanks again for the stories.
Speaking of Beijing, here's an old clip of Obama talking about his Asian foreign policy in 1992. Kind of telling.
Tracking cars is helps but it's not the right solution for them. Instead they should put the chips in their population at birth just in case their cell phone dies or is turned off.
They already track everyone's phone and have cameras everywhere taking video and pictures of just about every street in the country.
So this is one area where America is still ahead of China?
USA # 1 ! USA # 1 ! USA # 1 !
Here in Australia, it is more the licence plate readers that are now everywhere. No need for electronic tracking.
Scary, but I had a suicidal relative that drove off one day. Her husband rang the police, who could track her down very quickly due to number plate reading. So there is an up side.
When I was in China I found it disconcerting to see a lot of little flashes from overhead gantries etc. (I was wondering if my car was speeding). Later on I was told that as a general rule there were license plate readers etc. at every junction and main road such that vehicles are ALREADY being tracked at a fairly high level of granularity, so long as you are driving around in the city. Even if this new chip isn't rolled out, they can already track most drivers most places of interest.
In the US, there has been RFID in car tires since 2003. Yes, they can be tracked with sensors at the side of the road.
But Hillary took so many big bags full of money from China..
Yeah yeah, Bushbama did it first. But China managed to do it with less graft!
US has EZ-Pass, which is a defacto tracking system, even if not originally designed as such.
But at least with EZ-Pass you can opt out (at some inconvenience when you travel). You can't opt out of having a radio-linked tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) on any new car purchased in 2008 or later.
TPMSes work by having, in each tire's valve stem, a pressure sensor with a radio transmitter and a battery (good for 7 years, after which the system nags you until you replace the senders), which periodically transmits its unique identification number and the tire pressure reading. This can be received by roadside devices with directional antennas and/or under-road loops, and the sensor I.D.(s) used to identify the car.
It is trivial to collect the information to make the connection between TPMS I.D.s and vehicle owners by pointing a license-plate reading camera at an in-lane TPMS receiver loop, associating the license plate with any wheel squawks sent while the car is over the loop, and then adding that to a database of license plate vs. owner and insured additional drivers. (This even keeps it up to date when the transmitter batteries eventually run down and the transmitters are replaced.)
An ongoing record of which TPMS squawks are detected where and when gives a location record for each wheel, and thus the vehicle, along with its driver and any passengers.
So, thanks to the TREAD act, every new car sold in the US over the last ten years came equipped with four tracking transmitters. China is just catching up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why not just fry the chips?
With salt. Maybe a bit of sauce on top.
I am western and live in China and I can just tell you the surveillance state here is nothing like in western countries.
You have cameras over the bicyle and pedestrian lanes. You have no pedestrian path through blocks outside those official road.
Any night spent out of your home needs police registration, be it at friends or hotel.
Your id is recorded and checked when taking a train. And also a car pool service or a bicycle.
Your (basically-state-owned) bank account is mandatory to be linked to your (basically-state-owned) mobile SIM card and to your tax account. Same with your (state-controlled) social media accounts and online wallets.
Your messages don't reach their recipients depending on their content.
New! Your activities now grants you or cost you points that will impact how you can get a passport, a place at university, an appartment, borrow money.
And much much more.
Records your location no matter if you have an account or not.
Since all routes run through the NSA buildings, we've had this in place for years. I'm sure encryption and privacy were both a huge concern for OnStar when they rolled it out too.....
Orwell clearly had a tardis.
comrade that clip is reserved for vlads posting, didnt you read todays trollsky memo?
You can't opt out of having a radio-linked tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) on any new car purchased in 2008 or later.
RIght:
A) Buy replacement wheels (they don't come with TPMS sensors) and tires.
B) Mount on vehicle.
No.
This is not like any toll pass device. This doesn't just track when you go through a toll station.
This tracks you when you go to the supermarket. ...
This tracks you when you go to visit your girlfriend.
This tracks you when you take your kids to school.
Anyone who thinks this is in any way similar to what is done in the US, UK and elsewhere with cameras is likely a Chinese agent trying to make what is happening in China seem not that bad.
This is a violation of the human right to the freedom of movement.
Why go to these half measures, China? Just implant tracking chips in everyone from birth and make it a death-penalty offense to evade it. It's not like anyone actually believes you care about human rights at all.
Of course t he LCD screens will spare you the excruciating effort of putting on those pesky annual renewal stickers manually. Downside is the Stateâ(TM)s ability to put a BOLO notice on you carâ(TM)s plates in real time.
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
Bring back horses and freedom!
Is a little too low to drive on this road, alter your course or your vehicle will be shut down or seized.
To varying degrees cars are already tracked. License plates are probably readable from farther away.
You're tracked when you're carrying cell phone.
Casteism
They also have a very large group of people who read everything posted and delete politically incorrect posts or send goons to disappear you if it becomes too disagreeable with the goons' beliefs. Kind of like the left wants to do in the states.
They have their social credit system which is exactly like Black Mirror.
They've started making workers wear EEGs to monitor brain state and are making management decisions based on that data.