4G can track you to a few meters accuracy easily. Probably even better if you’re in a city. If cell response timings don’t give away your location, there’s a mechanism in your phone intended for emergency services that will have your phone turn on GPS and send back your current position automatically, initiated from over the network. Best to assume your carrier knows exactly where your phone is (as well as your car, as modern cars come with cellular modems as well).
mmWave 5G will give away your exact location all of the time. Exact as in down to the centimeter or less. The intent for 5G is to put a small transmitter on every street light so everyone gets gigabit internet everywhere.
This all works because these are active protocols. Passive protocols like RFID won’t be very useful for tracking people. It’s why airtags use Bluetooth and UWB for detection rather than RFID.
They have to be pretty obvious because they need to have a directed beam running at something like 12W per direction to get more than a few meters of range, and that assumes you have a massive antenna (credit card shaped at the very least) in visual range. In theory you could use beamforming to hide the antenna better but you’d be sucking in and continously transmitting a lot of power just to scan tags on cars.
It doesn’t make sense anyway. Everyone carrying at least one 4G capable device with them at all times these days. It they’re not, they probably have a mandatory cell phone/WiFi beacon/Bluetooth beacon of some sort embedded in their cars. The government can track everyone’s moves exactly if they wanted to, from kilometers away. Why waste kilowatts per street on RFID scanners when people give their location away for free anyway?
If these tags worked well enough for location tracking, I would’ve expected a lot more presence detection hardware for smart homes to use them.
4G can track you to a few meters accuracy easily. Probably even better if you’re in a city. If cell response timings don’t give away your location, there’s a mechanism in your phone intended for emergency services that will have your phone turn on GPS and send back your current position automatically, initiated from over the network. Best to assume your carrier knows exactly where your phone is (as well as your car, as modern cars come with cellular modems as well).
mmWave 5G will give away your exact location all of the time. Exact as in down to the centimeter or less. The intent for 5G is to put a small transmitter on every street light so everyone gets gigabit internet everywhere.
This all works because these are active protocols. Passive protocols like RFID won’t be very useful for tracking people. It’s why airtags use Bluetooth and UWB for detection rather than RFID.
The tower is where you can put an rfid scanner. There’s lots of them, they support power and network, and they aren’t obvious.
They have to be pretty obvious because they need to have a directed beam running at something like 12W per direction to get more than a few meters of range, and that assumes you have a massive antenna (credit card shaped at the very least) in visual range. In theory you could use beamforming to hide the antenna better but you’d be sucking in and continously transmitting a lot of power just to scan tags on cars.
It doesn’t make sense anyway. Everyone carrying at least one 4G capable device with them at all times these days. It they’re not, they probably have a mandatory cell phone/WiFi beacon/Bluetooth beacon of some sort embedded in their cars. The government can track everyone’s moves exactly if they wanted to, from kilometers away. Why waste kilowatts per street on RFID scanners when people give their location away for free anyway?
If these tags worked well enough for location tracking, I would’ve expected a lot more presence detection hardware for smart homes to use them.