In the US I've noticed a difference between west coast and the rest of the country. West coast tends to use these circle bandsaws to cut circles into the pavement, everywhere else uses a circular saw to cut rectangles into the pavement. Either way, these are the things you want to be stopped right on top of, especially if you're on a side street or left turn where you might get skipped if it doesn't sense you. If you're on a motorcycle, try to scoot up a bit so a car can be on them. They probably won't sense a motorcycle.
I was just thinking the other day there could be a business behind selling fake CRT shells that you can snap modern flat screens into. Just because. They could even include custom styles like this Shrek or hello kitty
Hey let's switch examples and see if your logic stands up. The name Los Angeles is Spanish. Because Spanish speakers have been there longer than English speakers. If the Spanish speakers don't like the president of the United States, does that mean it's perfectly acceptable for the Mexican government to provide Spanish speaking protesters in LA with artillery systems and missile batteries? Or is that fucking weird?
The computer automatically was able to determine they pinged a mile away 5 minutes ago, and a further mile in the other direction 5 minutes later. They were filtered out before a human was looking at the data.
This happens even when protests aren't happening. This is regular equipment used in traffic surveys conducted by every civil engineer in every county in the country. The surveys are for completely boring reasons like if the intersection signals should turn the left turn signal green before the straight lanes.
Granted the equipment used in these surveys intentionally ditch identifying information. They can gobble up things like Bluetooth hardware addresses from your car or phone as you drive by, and see if that address pops up on the other sensors in the area. That can reliably tell them which direction you turned at an intersection and they can start to see trends in the data.
This type of equipment is used everywhere and can be retooled to zero in on specific people just as easily as it's used for anonymous traffic statistics. Throw in things like stingrays and cell tower tracking and you're fucked.
Every single Crichton book was a cautionary tale about tech bros.