[luma]

You can do this for much cheaper - all four of your tires are broadcasting a unique ID to report tire pressure, the radio to pick it up is cheap (because cars), and TPMS has no facility to randomize or otherwise secure this.

[Gigachad]

It’s actually even easier, your car has a plate on the front with a unique ID that a camera scans, often to automatically track your park time for ticketing.

I can’t really care about obscure Bluetooth tracking when every business has CCTV doing facial recognition.

[wolvoleo]

Yeah exactly, with a car I would no longer be expecting any type of privacy, sadly.

Here in Holland we must even have a mobile phone module in every car so it can call the emergencies in case of a crash.

[userbinator]

Also, you can read the plate from much farther away than the TPMS sensors.

[stinkbeetle]

Even easier, electromagnetic radiation can be used to detect the presence and exact location and movements of not just automobiles, but also people! Many people have detectors for these things that can literally see through transparent material that makes up large sections of the walls of many houses and apartments.

[bell-cot]

A camera has quite a few failure modes (bad lighting, fog, dirty lens, obscured by plant growth, privacy laws, etc.) which a TPMS receiver & directional antenna don't.

[throwaway27448]

The plate is pretty trivial to fake though. For one thing you can just remove it, but it's trivial to alter with just spray paint. Or using an outdated plate, or someone else's plate, etc. it's identifying sort of how an phone number is supposed to be identifying: nominal, but not secure and trivially abused for fraud

[hammock]

Wait they use this for parking meters?! Which cities?

[everdrive]

I believe that every morning someone in the tech industry wakes up and devises a new place to cram some sort of radio. And it's appealing enough the the unwashed masses such that it becomes widely adopted and then unavoidable. I don't want TPMS in my tires. It's not as if checking tire pressure is difficult. No one will consider moving away from TPMS. You'll only hear technologists say "yes, but we could improve the standard! Perhaps encrypt it." They only know how to solve technological problems with more technology.

[spockz]

Not all cars have active TPMS. my Volvo xc90 had them but in later models they switched back to passive ones. So it is not even a given for higher end models.

[ssl-3]

That's not quite the end of the road, though: The tires themselves often have RFID tags embedded.

https://rfid.michelin.com/what-is-rfid/

[stirfish]

I've had trouble reading these from more than a few feet away, but I concede that I have no idea what I'm doing