Your car radio may be revealing your tastes A device made by an Alabama company can tell what station your car radio is tuned to.
Advertisers love it, but privacy advocates fear it.
For the past four years, Mobiltrak, a company in Birmingham, Ala., has been marketing a device that finds out what radio stations people are listening to inside their cars. Mobiltrak's clients include concert arenas, shopping malls and car dealerships that pay to install the shoebox-size devices at the entrances of their parking lots. The monitor picks up signals from a car radio's oscillator, the part of the radio that tunes into the station. The data is recorded and sent via modem to Mobiltrak, which then sends an e-mail report to its clients on a daily or weekly basis. Companies use Mobiltrak's device to determine whether the money they spend on radio advertising is being spent in the right place.