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Hacker warns about privacy leak in parking apps | inland

Barriers with intelligent cameras that open automatically when you leave the parking lot as a driver. They are convenient, but also a disaster for our privacy. Hackers can easily misuse our data. This is evident from a study by ethical hacker Inti De Ceukelaire that he reports on VRT NWS.

De Ceukelaire studied how difficult it is to track cars on the basis of a parking lot. He could easily spot 29 percent of the cars. De Ceukelaire put 120 license plates into Indigo’s parking app. He was able to see immediately when one of the drivers entered the parking lot, because the app is connected to a camera with license plate recognition at the entrance to the parking lot. It is not checked whether the entered license plate belongs to the app user.

De Ceukelaire was also able to find out where a vehicle was during a free parking session. “At the end of each day, my computer program ‘talked’ to thousands of digital parking meters asking if there was still free parking time available for the vehicles to be tracked. If my system was unable to create a one-second free parking session for that license plate in one of the free zones, I knew for certain that the vehicle was parked in that zone that same day, “he explains to VRT NWS.

It is therefore not so difficult for thieves to find out if you are in the house, warns De Ceukelaire. Also, people with bad intentions easily know how long a car will stay in a certain place. It gives them time to possibly wait for a driver or to track down a car with expensive items.

The hacker advocates a European-wide approach. De Ceukelaire has developed a platform, notmyplate.comwhere users can send a GDPR request to parking companies to stop plate processing.

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