Question: I have heard that rental car companies do (or used to) place transponders in their rental vehicles to track them in order to make sure that renters weren’t breaking the terms of their rental agreements. (Before the days of GPS of couses.) Does anyone know if this is/was true? And if it is, how do I find out if there is a transponder in MY car (which I purchased from Enterprise last year)? And please don’t tell me to ask Enterprise - I know better than to waste my breath.
Thanks in advance for the help!
If your vehicle did have a transponder (which I highly doubt) who would be tracking you? I’m sure Enterprise has more important things to do than tracking a vehicle that they no longer own. Besides, you can be tracked simply by your cellphone by any number of agencies.
Yes, and if your phone has a camera, they can watch you as well.
Btw, stop picking your nose.
RemcoW is right about the camera. If you have one on your PC or laptop you can also be monitored through those cameras as well. I don’t mean to alarm you but technology has made privacy a thing of the past. I won’t even tell you about Google Earth. No need to pull your shades because Google Earth has the technology to add x-ray to see inside buildings. We are in the 21st century after all. You have no idea of the existence of things you don’t know about.
Google earth is very cool for Civi use, I have a friend in the military and he says he has seen things real world that make Google Earth look like blind mans map…
I’ll give you an example of what I saw in the mid-1970’s. We had to disassemble some old missiles and we would leave the parts near the flightline. We were told to leave the area between such and such hours. The Soviets were monitoring the progress of the disassembly with their “spy-in-the-sky” satellite as part of the SALT treaty. We were doing the same to their missile disassembly process. I had a friend in a radar sight near the base who let me see a portion of one of the pictures of our disassembly area taken from space. Clearly shown was a Clark bar wrapper that we had taped to the top of one of our step vans. Imagine how far our technology has come since then.
Yes, rental agencies do track their vehicles. Rental agreements often contain clauses adding a charge for every trip out of state. The tracking systems automatically add the charge to the renter’s bill with every passage over the state line. A few years ago there we a few court cases on this issue that resulted in laws in California and New York prohiniting this practice by rantal agencies. Businessment were renting their cars and tarveling overe borders every day to conduct their business, then getting whacked with a bill at the end of the wekk of thousands of dollars after putting only minimal miles on the vehicles. In most states these hidden charges are still legal…and still added.
How to know if ?
I guess just look, probably up under the dash somewhere. Look for non-o.e. added and spliced wires to a small box quite well hidden…up and over and around.
We add on trackers to our used vehicles so the repo guys can find them.
Other finance companies add on not only gps tracking but an engine imobilizer too. You miss a payment and yayayayayaya it won’t even start.
The ‘‘snapshot’’ from Progressive insurance is exactly that. A gps tracker so thay can know if they can charge you more cuz you drive like bat outa hell. ( yah, they advertise it to ‘‘save you money’’ if you’re a safe driver, but we all know it’s used for the opposite too. )
IF your ex-rental still has the gps on it I wouldn’t worry much because the don’t own the vehicle any more and have no reason to go looking for it.
But how about your finance company ?
Remember the old adage, folks: if they’re really watchin’ ya it ain’t paranoia!
Funny, I too bought a Kia from Enterprise last year.
I suppose it is possible that the physical transponder unit is there, but who would be watching it? What could they possibly hope to gain by wasting their time to watch a car they no longer own? It is probably costly for them to track their cars, I suspect they would have disabled the transponder by now, if not removed it.
And sorry if it makes things worse, but if you are emitting any frequency of EM, you can theoretically be tracked. If the battery is in your phone (even if it’s off) you can theoretically be found. If you use a card to make a purchase, use a wifi connection somewhere, enter or exit a store, cross a videotaped intersection, etc. There are RFID tags in everything now, to include passports and driver’s licenses.
The anonymity lies in the fact that no one wants to find you. If it costs money, manpower or equipment, “the man” is not going to waste it on you. (That is meant as a compliment, I’m saying you aren’t a criminal lol)
+1
Can “somebody” track me?
Probably.
Am I worried about it?
No, because after a very short period of monitoring me, the “monitor” would fall asleep from boredom.
While I understand–in theory–the “dangers” of being tracked, I think that for the average citizen it is really a non-issue.
I worked for a startup company that specialized in positive ID solutions using biometrics.
At one point we were wondering what cameras could do for us so contacted this really small company that was able to recognize faces as you pass by the camera. It was actually quite amazing how well it could identify people. It was able to record the biometric of a face it didn’t recognize and, when it would see it again, it could raise a flag. There was no personal interaction needed. It would just tell you how often it would see a particular person walk by a particular camera. You could wear a hat or a beard one day and no beard or hat another and yet it would still come up with a match, along with a confidence number that it had seen you before.
That’s very important info for the alphabet soup agencies.
This wasn’t recent: it was 16 years ago, in the age where simple pentiums reigned. The technology has gotten a lot better and faster by now. The company we were interested in partnering with set up a pilot program in London, to recognize criminals and potential problems. It is in use today.
In my area, we have cameras on pretty much every street corner that has lights. They just quietly and gradually appeared. What’s the point of having that infrastructure if you have to have a person monitoring it? No doubt it is automated.
It can’t possibly be worth having, just to flag cars that run through a red light. All those eyes in the sky and nobody is using them? There’s a lot more to it, I bet.
I wouldn’t worry about being tracked. I doubt it’s legal unless it is disclosed. Just yesterday a drug dealer got out of jail because the DC police put a GPS tracking device on his car, let the warrant expire, then followed him into Maryland. Clearly, the police can’t put a PS on just any car. And if they can’t, I don’t see why anyone else can unless it is clearly disclose as part of a contract.
There are eight billion of us…They can’t track us all… I doubt they can track .001% of us…First, you have to give them a REASON to track you…I try to avoid doing that…