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After also reading the discussion in '17. How come this is trivially easy to make, very cheap and still we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe? Some car
by wjnc 7y ago
After also reading the discussion in '17. How come this is trivially easy to make, very cheap and still we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe? Some cars in my country have >1% chance of getting stolen in a given year. The incentives must be off somewhere? This is a device that could only be triggered after theft, thus hardly any privacy concerns, and still give quite a good location (perhaps improved with glonass and other sattelites). They can't be found easily (so small, only transmissions after stealing) and placed on any given wire in the car. Seems only beatable by placing the car in a cage after theft.
- amelius 7y agoBy the way, I think such devices exist for pets.
- 2rsf 7y agoThey do, I developed the basis for a pet tracker more than 10 years ago, actually the highest cost for them is the cellular plan and monthly service fees for the service.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI wish every wifi network just had a 64kbps always-open connection that anyone could use. But I guess we can’t have nice things unless it’s a pay-product by a telecom.
- auto 7y agoAt first read I was ready to write this off as a legal nightmare, but it’s interesting as a service concept. Run a router that supports this always-open (or rather, widely known auto mechanism) protocol, maybe get some kick back. That said, low data SIM cards are getting more and more feasible. My stepdad runs an android at a remote location for weather data, and with something like hourly, double digit count byte uploads he stays under the monthly limit to where the sim is essentially free.
- Scoundreller 7y agoI figure running it through Tor would fix the legal issues in exchange for ethical ones. At the consumer level, low data SIMs in Canada aren’t price competitive, hence my desire to cut out télécoms wherever possible. Indeed, Free.fr let’s their mobile customers connect to any of their fixed-network subscriber’s wifi with appropriate segmentation. Educational users can connect to eduroam at any participating institution. I think Fon tried to go down this road, but no go.
- 2rsf 7y agoThe Israeli Ituran has a similar service for cars, although I think they are based on cellular location and not GPS. There are few problems with that though- thieves know where and how to disable the device, even if you can locate the car you need someone to go and fetch it- most of the times this will be in place you don't want to go to alone, and a problem unique to Israel is that thieves can cross the border to the Palestinian Authority before you can deploy any police force to stop them.
- Scoundreller 7y agoNo exit controls in Israel? Or not enough time to get the car on a list?
- cnlevy 7y agoThere are no exit controls. And you can be sure that after 2 hours of theft, your car has already been taken apart and sold.
- pjc50 7y agoVarious services exist for this already, but someone has to pay the ongoing SIM fees. Criminals are also surprisingly good at removing them, and the higher value cars are usually stolen with the keys and then immediately containerised for export. Or the cars are stolen for use in some other crime and then abandoned, sometimes even before the owner knows about it.
- michaelt 7y agoAccording to [1] in the UK car thefts peaked in 1993 at 36 incidents per thousand car-owning households, and it's now dropped to 4. Is there really still a massive stolen car problem? [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47023003 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47023003
- richrichardsson 7y agoUK != Europe, saying that I don't know if 660k thefts EU-wide in 2016 [1] constitutes a "massive problem" or not, comes to around 0.1% thefts per person (assuming a rough 500 million EU population). [1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Crime_statistics#Car_thefts_down_by_36_.25_between_2008_and_2016 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
- toyg 7y agoAnecdotally, there are still a few issues for the extreme ends of the market - luxury (high effort, high returns) and bangers (very low effort, typically cut for parts). Anything in between (“sensibly priced cars”, to use a clarksonism) is too much effort and risk for not enough returns. But yes, it’s nowhere as bad as it was in the ‘80s/‘90s. This has to do with social changes (the drop in heroin use and crime, and general improvement in living standards) as much as with technological ones (alarms installed by default, electronic locks on injection).
- jstanley 7y ago> This is a device that could only be triggered after theft, thus hardly any privacy concerns How would the car know when it has been stolen?
- hoseja 7y agoI assume by you sending it and activation SMS.
- jstanley 7y agoThat would imply an always-on mobile phone connection inside the car, which is bad for privacy because now the phone company knows the car's rough location at all times.
- sanlyx 7y agoIt does not matter for the 90% of the people who do not turn on airplane mode in their phones when they get in the car.
- bouk 7y ago> we have a massive stolen car problem in Europe Any kind of generalization like that for all of Europe is bound to be wrong
- swarnie_ 7y agoIf you trust the RAC around 110k cars were stolen last year in the UK out of 38+ million. Assume all cars are created and stolen equal that's not really a massive problem in my world.