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When you write down a license plate number you're not surveilling the owner of the car. The privacy being talked about here is being lost in the crowd—you're not protected from someone looking for your license plate but you are protected against some corporation or the authorities knowing everywhere you go in real time with perfect accuracy and recall.

This is one of those things that's annoying to talk about, reason about, and legislate against because our intuition fails us when thinking about emergent behaviors. Some examples:

1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.

2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.

3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.

4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.

5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.

Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:

1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.

2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.

To clarify: I don't care about the emergent behaviors to the extent that I would somehow make license plates private, which is a completely impractical idea.

The identifying info attached to license plates can be kept safeguarded. Even so, license plates can be used to fingerprint a vehicle. Eyewitnesses can attach identities to license plates; e.g. you can easily know the license plates of acquantances such as neigbors and recognize them in a different context.

Some kind of technological solution of nonce license plates. They would have to use display technology, making them fragile, poorly visible, prone to various malfunctions.

I think lots of these issues are scale issues. Most people agree having some sort of weapon is fine up to a point.. that point may be a knife or a rifle but most folks probably think private citizens shouldn’t have tactical nuclear weapons.

Likewise, license plates are fine, full real-time surveillance of all movement in your country probably not great and not something the public wants.

Almost of these slippery slope issues are scaling problems, especially in privacy. Tracking people with cookies at your site, probably fine, using third party cookies to track everything your visit on the internet, maybe less great. Etc etc.

Legislating scale seems to be something that is particularly difficult since it’s easily argued, as you did, that’s it’s not inherently bad.

The thing is, motor vehicles are not people, and license plates are not faces.

You're coercing EFF's point (corporations are tracking people's movements and building a database of people's whereabouts and connections using license plate scanners, and that's an issue) into a very different one (license plates should be a private information).

Of course, that leads you to a flawed conclusion.

> because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

That demographic hasn't had a very good track record on privacy recently, has it?

my license plate is only relevant if an accident happens or i violate some traffic law. in the same way that others involved in the accident will want me to reveal my identity which is not public either. in a perfect world where everyone is honest and no one makes mistakes, we would not even need license plates. but that does not mean that other information that can be deduced from the license plate, such as the time and location or my route, also my home and my workplace, should be available to anyone who asks for it.

I'll summarize your argument: You don't have privacy in public.

I agree.

In some abstract sense yes, but this doesn't mean that every moment of our lives when we leave our private home should be surveilled and recorded and analyzed for potential use by whoever is in power at any point in the future.

Not suggesting you are saying that, but there's a spectrum of what it means for behavior to be public.

Sure, my location is technically public in the sense that sometimes people see me when I go somewhere. But I would much rather not always be recorded with gps location and video and audio to be stored forever and available to those in power.

I'm not one to promote AI, but when you suck at summarizing this bad, maybe give that a shot.

You have lots of privacy in public.

You don't get to legally conceal the identifying marker attached to a two-ton murder weapon on wheels that you either own, rented, borrowed or stole.

That's it.

My comment even mentions that you have options if you want an unmarked wheeled vehicle for staying as private as possible while yet locomoting at a decent pace.

I don’t think the lack of privacy of the commons means it’s fine to stalk people.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on this with a little more nuance in their decision in Katz v. United States:

“What a person knowingly exposes to the public, even in his own home or office, is not a subject of Fourth Amendment protection. But what he seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

This “lack of privacy in public” absolutism would mean that there would never be certiorari granted for these types of cases in the first place.

Reductionist at best, IMO

See also United States v Jones, Carpenter v United States

> If you can't get me to care about this "privacy" issue, your narrative is screwed, because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

your assertion of credentials is thoroughly countered by the information which is shared in your profile.

You're claiming that someone can't possibly be a pro-freedom libertarian if they choose to put some links in their HN profile. That's... a stretch.

I have not made an assertion of "credentials"; I have no idea what sort of inferential garden path you are on.