I can't tell you how I know this, but drive just about anywhere within 20 miles of DC and everything about you that is possible is processed, cataloged, cross-references, and stored.
As a surveillance system, this has only modest potential. It would be useful to pair this with license plate readers, and notice cars whose license plate/tire ID relationships have changed.
It's probably more useful for taking inventory at car rental lots and finding abandoned/overtime cars in big parking lots. There might be commercial potential in this. Anybody with a big fleet could use something that checks their vehicles as they go in and out.
[1] http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~Gruteser/papers/xu_tpms10.pdf [2] http://elib.dlr.de/71397/1/VP_TS_NearctisTPMS_110607.pdf
How/Why?
The suggestion above is to merely take note, as it is unusual.
Or, I suppose, legally swapping wheels, or just pressure sensors.
AFAIK, TPMS systems are all proprietary and use much simpler protocols than BT.
Loosely related...
There are two types if TPMS, direct and indirect.
Direct TMPS use a battery powered sensor on either side of the valve stem to monitor tire pressure and transmit it wirelessly to the car's computer. They're very precise but rely on an expensive battery powered sensor on the valve stem, because of this they are less reliable, prone to failure, damage and tamper. You can identify direct TPMS by the green valve stem caps on a car.
Indirect monitoring leverages the tire speed sensor of the ABS or ESC systems to monitor drag induced by a tire with low pressure, it's not precise but it's accurate and far more reliable. And quite clever IMO.
The NHTSA instituted rule 126 requiring ESC on most vehicles, since TPMS and ABS are subsets of technology necessary for ESC, you should see all three features offered on most new cars today.
Then what if I take these images and post them online with your name and address? It's all public information and data captured outside of your house. It should then be fine for me to take this public data and sell it to an aggregator, say Facebook and Amazon, right?
Where do you draw the line?
Luckily for me I drive an old car (definitely pre-bluetooth for sure) so that part wouldn't apply to me, but the increasing use of plate readers applies to everyone, everywhere.
I cannot tell you where I know this from, but the newest top secret satellites launched recently from Florida will cover the whole US terrain with infrared scanners. Now, given every person has a different size of veins running under their skin in slightly different ways, there are no two people with the same configuration of blood circulation system. So unless you are wearing metal armor 24/7, you are being tracked and cataloged of when and how long you been.
So please - update your tires to let your car know and to notify you when your pressure is low. It might safe your life!
But even beyond that, water vapor is opaque to most IR frequencies. So a cloudy day would be enough to render this system useless.
100% bullshit imho.
We could definitely drive up to Las Vegas and make a bonding, lawful bet. But I need to know how much $ you have on your mind, so I'm not wasting my time here.
I assume "mental check" would be done by physician selected by you. But as long as she/he has expertise in the field and is licensed in the USA, I'm fine with that.
Gated communities fall into this class. So this camera would be targeting the HOA market, but not gated communities which have gates, locks and guards.
Personally, I don't like HOAs, and I don't like private neighborhoods. To the point that I refuse to look at property with an HOA.
But this obviously takes more effort than simply buying property that isn't subject to a HOA in the first place.
Your state court system may also be able to clear restrictive covenants from your property if the HOA makes any mistakes in enforcement. That is highly dependent on your neighbors, so success is by no means guaranteed.
A lot of HOAs can be brought to heel by threatening to erect antennas on your property, for the purposes of amateur radio communications and reception of broadcast signals. No covenant restricting those types of antennas is enforceable in the US, and most of the HOAs know it, or will know it shortly after consulting with a lawyer.
Once people start referring you as the Nagging Committee, it's hard to walk back from that.
I would bet money that they will be using this system for mapping and tracking for autonomous cars driving the last mile. If you want to bootstrap that localized map, then you need to have a use case that is not driverless cars currently.
My biggest issue, though, is the inequitable terms of tracking. If you live in a given neighborhood then you can opt out. Great. That gives those people preference. And treats everyone else as lesser citizens because they don't live there. We're talking about public spaces so there really shouldn't be any inequity. I think the company behind this sees the opt out ability for locals as the only way to make this palatable to people on a large scale.
Also, how is "neighborhood" defined? I assume it's by them and has some radius or something like that. And I'm also fairly certain to opt out would require me creating an account and providing my name, address, and car info (at minimum).
You want to record everything in public spaces? Fine, the law says you can do that so I respect that right. But that does not mean I am a fan of this by any stretch of the imagination. I feel like the real reason for this is something more nefarious they have planned later on - it could really be a way to finally track the remaining untrackables in our society who may be older and not have or use all the fancy tech we have today that tracks everything. It could also include people like myself that go to reasonable but not insane methods to circumvent tracking methods simply because I don't like to be tracked. There's really nothing I can do if they see me leave my house and drive to my friend's place and hang out there for 5 hours. Since I don't use social media they can't really connect that he and I are close friends without a tool like this. They can now make that association, which was previously near impossible to achieve.