this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Privacy
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In the US at least, these are generally for monitoring traffic, both current congestion conditions and total traffic over time for planning repairs and changes to traffic pattens. This is the same basic technology that has been used at traffic lights for ages to determine if a car is waiting for the light.
It's highly unlikely they could track an individual vehicle. These can measure the approximate mass of the metal in the vehicle, but not to a specific enough measure that it would be able to determine the difference between similarly sized models of vehicles, much less a specific vehicle. Mostly they just measure to make sure they're detecting a vehicle vs metal trash or something that might be on the road. They are more sophisticated and lower cost to install and power than they used to be which is why they can now be used on moving vehicles vs previous iterations that only really worked for stopped vehicles near existing power infrastructure like a traffic light. But that's about it.