I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
If the car is leased, wouldn’t this just give leasing company details?
In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off.
Permanent rental it is then. :)
You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL
Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc.
The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute.
Then never think about it again.
Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students).
Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture.
Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York.
Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered.
Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead.
Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property.
Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is.
Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed?
Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill?
In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance.
PS Hello from Grand Rapids!
This Michigan thing sounds like it walks right up to the line if not over it.
For homeowners, the real estate transactions are public and majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts.
What a time to live in!
The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression.
Most people don't expect their identity to be discoverable from their driving.
Getting tracked by your map application or OS platform can be countered by using an open source ROM and a local map provider like OpenStreetMap. Gtting tracked by the car itself can oftentimes be prevented by unplugging the telematics unit (or its antennas) or bypassing it with special cables. But there's nothing you can legally do to protect against the Flock cameras, without ignoring the law entirely and going around town with an angle grinder.
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors?
Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases.
Lets brainstorm!
Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio?
Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail!
Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes...
And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative:
..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!!
Or: Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time!
That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil.
You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives.
All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil.
Now, the unredacted registration information is more limited. If you aren't in the (fairly broad) category of people who are entitled to the unredacted information, you can still get the records but the items legally defined as PII will be redacted.
That still makes the license plate PII, though.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50