This one?

Boarding a plane by scanning a QR code off my watch stills feels pretty cool even though you’ve been able to do it for years now.

That’s not the point I’m making. You should disable your cars modem if it has one, but you still should have no expectation of privacy. Thinking you can have anonymity with a license plate displayed to everyone is foolish. It’s like asking how to be anonymous while wearing a name tag and the same clothes every day.

I reconstructed my comment. I believe people thought I meant disabling the modem is pointless due to ALPRs, but that wasn’t what I was trying to communicate.

Let me try this comment again.

There is no driving with privacy or anonymity unless you’re on private land.

Anyone got tips for how to anonymize their car?

Remove the license plate. You will rarely have privacy driving a car on a public road. You should disable the modem, of course, but you’re still not going to be driving anonymously or privately. Automated license plate readers means your travels are going into databases that very well could be breached at some point in time.

Law enforcement use of ALPRs is rapidly expanding, with tens of thousands of readers in use throughout the United States; one survey indicates that in 2016 and 2017 alone, 173 law enforcement agencies collectively scanned 2.5 billion license plates.

According to the latest available numbers from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, 93 percent of police departments in cities with populations of 1 million or more use their own ALPR systems, some of which can scan nearly 2,000 license plates per minute. In cities with populations of 100,000 or more, 75 percent of police departments use ALPR systems.

Despite this expansive data collection effort, many departments have not developed a policy to govern the use of ALPR technology, or provided privacy protections.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/automatic-license-plate-readers-legal-status-and-policy-recommendations

The point I was trying to make is driving a car is inherently not private due to license plates. Of course license plate readers can’t get information directly from the ECU, but thinking you’re going to be driving privately because you don’t have a modem in your car is naive, IMO. Car privacy is shit even if you disable the modem, which I wasn’t recommending against. Of course you should disable it. It’s still a very public activity you’re doing that’s likely being tracked by license plate readers.

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Your global systemic hypotheticals are flawed in that they don’t match what actually occurred. Every electronic system didn’t crash. Using cash to buy things was still possible at many places, while people who only had cards couldn’t.

That’s not what I witnessed recently. Payment processors went down but local POS was fine. Inventory didn’t matter with the short duration of the outage. This is one of the reasons going cashless is a bad idea. Far from the only one, but it’s a factor, and I experienced it. Going cashless reduces diversity in payment options and makes the system more vulnerable.

When the payment processor goes down, I can buy my groceries/gas/weed with cash, not by flossing my teeth. I don’t follow the point you’re making. Going fully cashless is a bad idea, and the recent outage didn’t affect every system used. I don’t see how having multiple methods of payment is possibly a bad thing. I’m not advocating for only cash.

Using cash won’t prevent this from happening.

I mean yeah, that’s why I said both, not just cash. I carry some cash on me because you never know. I’d also like to see less monopolization of just about everything because it makes for single points of failure. Diversifying your payment methods by including the potential for cash also helps.

…why not both?

That’s the one I’ve heard bad things about.

https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/mozilla-ditches-privacy-partner-over-conflict-of-interest

That’s becoming less feasible with every day that passes.

Regular people sure, but this is Lemmy. The nerd concentration here is significantly higher than average. I dunno, just thought it was fairly common knowledge in tech literate people that wireless G is outdated, AX is current, things like that. I can’t imagine spending money on a router without knowing the basics, which I’d consider the G/N/AC etc standard to be the minimum you need to know for making a decent purchase.

Fair enough. I thought it was just as common knowledge as wireless cellphone standards. Kinda surprised to see most people on Lemmy don’t pay attention to these, lots of the kinds of people who wouldn’t use the ISP supplied router / AP are here. Or so I thought.

I don’t know the 802.11 specs at all, but I know enough to purchase a router that won’t be outdated quickly.

You’re kidding, right? Wireless G, N, AC, AX etc are commonly printed all over the boxes of routers and is the main way to talk about their speed and how new they are. Do you not buy your own router? It seems as common to me as 3G/4G/5G but for a different kind of wireless.

I wouldn’t expect my mom to know it, I would expect most people on Lemmy to know and most somewhat tech familiar people to know. Not deep into the specs, but knowing AC is faster than N.