"If NYDOT can put up readers," says Puking Monkey, "other agencies could as well. In other words, reading of the E-ZPasses won't be very useful for uniquely tracking you or your speed, but it's a reminder once again that if you accept some kind of tracking device, it may be used in ways you wouldn't expect.Īs for blocking that tracking, if you're not excited about it, Puking Monkey recommends that you "bag the tag, and only bring it out when you want to pay a toll." Most tags come with a "Faraday cage" type bag through which it can't be read. Hence the system cannot identify the tag user and does not keep any record of the tag sightings." It runs as I-90 East/West bound from the western border of NY to Albany, then it changes to I-87 North/South bound from Albany to New York City. Tag sightings (reads) age off the system after several minutes or after they are paired and are not stored because they are of no value. " Travel times are used to estimate average speeds for general traveler information and performance metrics. The scrambled ID is held in dynamic memory for several minutes to compare with other sightings from other readers strategically placed for the purpose of measuring travel times which are then averaged to develop an understanding of traffic conditions," says TransCore spokesperson Barbara Catlin by email. "The tag ID is scrambled to make it anonymous. A 2013 case study from the company notes that the $50 million project to improve traffic congestion in New York also involved the installation of a network of traffic microwave sensors, and has been successful enough that the city plans to expand it another 270 blocks. TransCore, a company that makes the RFID readers that New York is using to pick up on E-ZPasses, was more forthcoming. This image via 'Puking Monkey' shows what the TransCore readers look like Notably, the fact that E-ZPasses will be used as a tracking device outside of toll payment, is not disclosed anywhere that I could see in the terms and conditions. The DoT was not forthcoming about what exactly was read from the passes or how long geolocation information from the passes was kept. The city uses the data from the readers to provide real-time traffic information, as for this tool. A spokesperson for the New York Department of Transportation, Scott Gastel, says the E-Z Pass readers are on highways across the city, and on streets in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island, and have been in use for years. It's part of Midtown in Motion, an initiative to feed information from lots of sensors into New York's traffic management center. This isn't a part of the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, the millions-dollar project emulating London's Ring of Steel with extreme surveillance. Chuck Schumer's remarks about retailers tracking people who come into their stores using their cell phones. At Defcon, where he presented his findings, Puking Monkey said he found the reading of the E-ZPass outside of where he thought it would be read when he put it in his car "intrusive and unsettling," quoting from Sen.
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