Your phone may be giving a roadside sensor clues about where you go and which devices regularly travel alongside you.Say you carpool to work with the same person most mornings.
Your car passes a license plate reader, which records the plate along with the time and location.Meanwhile, another sensor detects wireless signals coming from devices traveling nearby.
Your phone might be there.So could a smartwatch, wireless headphones or electronics built into the car.After enough trips, software may recognize that some of those signals tend to move together.
Now there is a recurring electronic pattern associated with that vehicle.Weeks later, one of those signals appears somewhere else, perhaps near a different vehicle connected to an investigation.
Police may not know who owns the device yet.However, its previous connections could give investigators a place to start.LICENSE PLATE CAMERAS ARE TRACKING DRIVERS EVERYWHERESignalTrace links wireless signals from phones, wearables and other devices with license plate reader data to identify recurring travel patterns.
(Jim Craige for LDOUSCSS)That is the idea behind SignalTrace, a technology marketed to law enforcement by security company Leonardo.And it raises a big privacy question: How anonymous is a device signal once it can be tied to a vehicle, repeated locations and other devices traveling alongside it?New! Free live CyberGuy class: Protect Your Money From Today’s Biggest ThreatsJoin us Saturday, August 29, at 10 AM ET for a free CyberGuy LIVE class covering five simple steps to help defend yourself against AI scams, fraud, identity theft and financial hacks.
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