There was a similar answer on the Reddit thread also – it’s a shipping container RFID tag, it’s not really doing anything, it’s not really worth much either.
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Yes, the technology by itself may be benign. However it’s what an entity chooses to do with the data it collects on the person they’re tracking that may make it dangerous.
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… so now we know how it got on this car – someone randomly put it on in a grocery store parking lot 
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Wow, the most rational response.
Considering the numbering and the bright yellow color I am about 99% certain that this wound up on the car by accident(fell off a truck and then stuck to the passenger vehicle).
These are not “GPS trackers”. These are reusable ‘toll tag’-like devices that they stick to vehicles to track them around large shipping yards and do inventory management. You could hypothetically track which toll booths someone passed through, but the police would probably be more accurate if they just tracked your cellphone. This would literally be the most backwards and insane way to track someone for nefarious purposes.
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This is what I was thinking. This is an insanely inaccurate and convoluted method to track someone. I’d be very very surprised if it didn’t happen exactly as you described… fell or got knocked off a semi and latched itself onto the car incidentally.
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Oh I get that. And it is suspicious to have this suddenly show up attached
to the car. However if in fact this tag is a simple RFID tag then you
would have to be in range of a reader. Now one answer could be there is a
geo tracker in the device that drops data dumps upon a successful read but
my experience with RFID tags are that the amount of data is pretty small.
Just a bit more then you would find on a mag strip
One of these?
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Heh - stick it to a boat!
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Probably get found on an airplane…
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“…the big problem is why is it on your car”
Because they made the Poor Lifestyle Choice to live in a surveillance state far surpassing the greediest dreams of the Stasi?
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It’s yours now. I would put it on a Greyhound bus headed cross-country.
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Why not open it, disable it and put it back…then place a discreet camera on the vehicle pointed at it and see who comes a callin’?
You think people sticking trackers to cars don’t also monitor social media?
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Yeah, sure buddy. That’s exactly what the lizard people want you to think.
You think the reptile high command makes their tracking and mind leech devices look like something dangerous?
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I’m sure the Sheriff’s Secret Police are on their way to get it right now!
A cousin of mine was on the team that invented that.
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BoingBoing qualifies as social media? I thought we were mostly a collection of grumpy introverted curmudgeons! (OK, I’m an ambivert and I’m not really that grumpy or curmudgeonly these days … but … I’m sure I’ve got a point here somewhere.)
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Or… sneak under a parked cop car while they’re eating lunch somewhere.
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