this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2026
175 points (98.3% liked)

Technology

85515 readers
4276 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
175
License Plate Cameras Will Soon Track Phones, Wearables, Infotainment, and Even Your Pets (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 5 hours ago by LuminousLuddite@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
23 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] DrakeAlbrecht@lemmy.world 8 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Industry researchers have managed to create directional antennas that read 125 kHz chips (the kind used in pets) from as far away as one meter. That's most or all of the width of a sidewalk, if the reader is placed at ground level.

[–] Warl0k3@lemmy.world 4 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

For unimplanted tags of unspecified size sure it's technically possible to do, but I'll let the article summarize why this is blatant marketing hype:

The ideal lab setup often fails miserably once you mount the reader near a gate or machine frame.

It’s worth saying: 1 meter is an ambitious goal for 125kHz. LF systems are intentionally short-range to prevent cross-talk. If you truly need 1-meter coverage, sometimes the real solution isn’t to push more current — it’s to rethink geometry, use multi-coil zones, or explore hybrid systems (LF for identity, HF/UHF for distance).

and then mention that the interference from the dermis vastly reduces the useful range of the tags, and that the article doesn't actually specify what type of tag they're designing for (or if it's using a set orientation...).