The irony is that people accused 20th Century academics of being "post-modern" and "post-truth" when really they were reporting accurately on how fragile our society is.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.
Remember that you are not being tracked, the vehicle is, because the vehicle is the dangerous thing.
The baseline expectation of anyone operating heavy machinery in public should be that it is tracked for safety and accountability. This is a good thing. We've been installing tracking numbers on them for decades, what did you think they were for?
I understand for many people, their movements and their vehicle's movements are 1:1, so it can feel like tracking their vehicle is tracking them. If you care about privacy, travel without the heavy machinery. Walk, bike, transit. If your region does not allow you to do this, direct your privacy-related energy towards making that possible, rather than reducing accountability for drivers.
Edit: I wonder how the commenters below feel about tracking jets, probably similar to how I feel about tracking their cars.
When Bruno Latour tried to argue that science was socially constructed, he wasn't trying to undermine it. He was trying to be challenge a certain naive understanding of the world in which science is clearly true, progress is obvious to all, and science/technology can be entirely divorced from the rest of society. In recent years, he has undertaken an active effort to shore up the authority of science, but this isn't him recanting. He always knew the scientific consensus was fragile.
Latour is just one example of many. The concept of performativity, Adorno and Horkheimer on the failure of the Enlightenment, Feyerabend's epistemic anarchism. All attempts to understand society in a rigorous way that were dismissed or willfully misunderstood because a naive narrative of progress meant not having to worry about those kinds of things. We were going to get ever closer to the truth and build better and better things, with no negative consequences. That was the promise.