How did this thing end up in a guy's car?

What you do is, find the nearest cop car and put it under there.

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Except it can be used that way:
https://www.tech.slashdot.org/story/13/09/13/1547218/nyc-is-tracking-rfid-toll-collection-tags-all-over-the-city

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There are some commercial parking garages that now use RFIDs to track the comings and goings of their regular tenants so that they can better anticipate capacity issues. I believe Icon Parking does this with their monthly tenants in NYC.

I wonder if this person recently switched garages or if their garage recently implemented such a system?

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If you have enough sensors yes. My point was you don’t go slapping a yellow shipping container tracking tag on a car to follow it around. If you have toll sensors all over the place, and people with an easy-pass like transponder, then it’s just a data correlation issue.

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PINC would probably like their tracker back. It may have ended up on your vehicle placed by someone who didn’t like being tracked as part of their workday. You can let PINC know you have it here:
http://www.pincsolutions.com/contact

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Same thing happened to Buckaroo Banzai, and look at the trouble HE got into.

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Maybe accidentally left there by the factory? If it is really just an RFID tracker, then it could have been used to track the car as it moved down the assembly line.

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Garages are allowed to place trackers on customers’ cars without their permission? If it’s not explicitly written into a user agreement (i.e., signage), I’m thinking it could be illegal.

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Put the device back on your car, and drive your car through the front end of a local department store and see if it sets off the stolen merchandise alarm. I’m really curious about this.

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Well if it is just an RFID tag then it will only transmit some data when it comes within range of a reader. I would be curious as to what data it transmits.

I worked with PINC in the past at my job. Literally Yard Management. We used RFID tags on trailers to let drivers know what door to drive up to and to open the gates at our distro centers. Pretty benign stuff actually. I even set up a lab for integration development.

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Maybe RTFA? Where it wasn’t there last week?

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Looks like it’s a possible gps tracker. Often used by repo agents.
Some of the other comments suggest rfid not strong enough to be used, but you’d be quite surprised at the vast mobility of rfid signals.

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I wouldn’t be surprised if it was buried in some sort of user agreement that tenants sign.

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It’s not a GPS tracker. the company’s imprints are on the tag. You can get some surprising range with RFID, but not under many conditions. It’s ill suited for the purpose of tracking a vehicle at long range.

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Dear Sir:

Which one of these is you?

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I’m the one in the middle!

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My husband’s ex-employer just docked $40 from all of their employees’ paychecks and he never signed any agreement. That garage and other that I’ve seen in SoCal either have employees use their badges to gain entry or have a placard to display a permit. Hmm.

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Right even then you couldn’t tell where the car is at any given moment, only when a particular tag passed a certain sensor after the fact. NYC is using Easy Pass because the tags are pervasive, the readers were already well distributed on toll roadways around the area, with the data from those toll plazas having been proved useful. Its an expansion of an existing metric/system rather than a method for tracking a particular person.

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We need to start tagging people with RTFAID tags when they want to comment…

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