Hacker News Reader

Comment by mothballed | Hacker News Reader

License plates aren't compatible with the 4th amendment, and this only becomes more obvious with time.

No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is.

License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).

The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.

The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.

It's mostly redundant as the registration schemes in most other countries do the same thing.

Not necessarily, EU car registration usually provides information about who the car is registered to, not who owns it. These are two different things, of which only the first seems like something the government actually might need to know.

"EU car registration usually provides information about who the car is registered to, not who owns it."

The authorities disagree.

https://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/vehicles/registration/...

Not really sure where you see the disagreement?

it seems more feasible to get rid of the license plates than to control public or private imaging and analytics of the license plates.

It does seem easier, but very low vlaue. If we let the recoding continue we will still have facial recognition, gait recognition, OnStar tracking, etc.

sure, but those are much less effective as programs and much less difficult to counteract at an individual level.

i think taking the easy win here could be very effective and provide a path towards solving the rest.

Given technology's march forward, it seems that higher resolution cameras would enable tracking systems to determine unique car identities by the pattern of imperfections in the vehicle, much like biologists sort leopards by their spots.

IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.

People may not understand how deep this goes. With municipalities eagerly allowing companies like Flock to hoover up license plates and centrally aggregate this data there is a very strong argument this is true and amounts to 4A violations when considered in total.

Add that many states have laws that are /more/ punishing if you intentionally obscure your plate than simply not having one, what other conclusion can be drawn? The state’s arguments are thin. “Oh we need it to find criminals / vehicles of interest” oh sure, so you get to suck up all our data to protect a few toll roads and track a few supposed criminals. The balance of benefit to society is dubious at best IMO.

Steve Jobs famously used to get a new car every 6 months, because in California, you don't have to put plates on it for that amount of time. So he could essentially permanently drive around without an attached license plate.

I think about this from time to time.

That's illegal now, not that it affects him any more.

Well that's just based.

Paper plates are still required. The number on it may not be as large as the actual plate, but there is definitely a unique number on it that is absolutely registered to owner of the car.

This sounds a lot like urban legend / internet lore

California did not require numbered paper plates when Jobs did this. Car dealers would put paper plates advertising themselves on the car, but you could remove them. Your temporary registration was taped on the inside of the front windshield.

I personally saw his SL500 with dealer plates a couple of times while visiting the Apple campus as a vendor. He'd park in the handicap spot too.

Yep, and just paid all the fines if / when he got them.

Part of the problem is that you're simply not allowed to sue the people who are misusing the technology to violate the level of privacy everyone actually does expect in public.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-...

I want to hear out your point more, but by that logic, neither is walking around without a mask, or using a transit pass, or paying for things with a credit card.

LP are compelled search of your papers by police without RAS nor PC.

You don't own a license plate. It's the state's property.

Not in my state.

A license plate seems as much of a "paper" as the house numbers on my mailbox.

Even if you accept equivalence on face, I don't have a house number anywhere, nor a mailbox, nor is there any state law requiring so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com