When I went to my local Hands Off protest in April, the crowd were on either side of a busy street. Should the people in the cars driving by have turned their phones off?
The computer automatically was able to determine they pinged a mile away 5 minutes ago, and a further mile in the other direction 5 minutes later. They were filtered out before a human was looking at the data.
This happens even when protests aren’t happening. This is regular equipment used in traffic surveys conducted by every civil engineer in every county in the country. The surveys are for completely boring reasons like if the intersection signals should turn the left turn signal green before the straight lanes.
Granted the equipment used in these surveys intentionally ditch identifying information. They can gobble up things like Bluetooth hardware addresses from your car or phone as you drive by, and see if that address pops up on the other sensors in the area. That can reliably tell them which direction you turned at an intersection and they can start to see trends in the data.
This type of equipment is used everywhere and can be retooled to zero in on specific people just as easily as it’s used for anonymous traffic statistics. Throw in things like stingrays and cell tower tracking and you’re fucked.
There’s a difference in a single ping nearby and several pings with a protest, also like the LA protests they may have drones overhead to get even more accurate pings
Edit: sorry maybe you weren’t being disingenuous if you actually attended one. My apologies if so
When I went to my local Hands Off protest in April, the crowd were on either side of a busy street. Should the people in the cars driving by have turned their phones off?
The computer automatically was able to determine they pinged a mile away 5 minutes ago, and a further mile in the other direction 5 minutes later. They were filtered out before a human was looking at the data.
This happens even when protests aren’t happening. This is regular equipment used in traffic surveys conducted by every civil engineer in every county in the country. The surveys are for completely boring reasons like if the intersection signals should turn the left turn signal green before the straight lanes.
Granted the equipment used in these surveys intentionally ditch identifying information. They can gobble up things like Bluetooth hardware addresses from your car or phone as you drive by, and see if that address pops up on the other sensors in the area. That can reliably tell them which direction you turned at an intersection and they can start to see trends in the data.
This type of equipment is used everywhere and can be retooled to zero in on specific people just as easily as it’s used for anonymous traffic statistics. Throw in things like stingrays and cell tower tracking and you’re fucked.
I’d believe you if the traffic lights here weren’t so awful, unsafe, and inefficient.
Lol fair. Your local PD gets tens of millions of dollars worth of military equipment like APCs every year and they’re still not effective either.
There’s a difference in a single ping nearby and several pings with a protest, also like the LA protests they may have drones overhead to get even more accurate pings
Edit: sorry maybe you weren’t being disingenuous if you actually attended one. My apologies if so
Yes, I did attend a protest, and I don’t know everything about technology. Thanks for your answer.