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Comment by asdf3 | Hacker News Reader

Abortion protesters used to write down the license plates... just some publicly available meta-data, right?

Yes. What is your point? Nobody has any expectation of a right to drive anonymously.

But they do have a right to privacy in their medical history. Recording license plate numbers at a hospital, abortion clinic, etc. is a violation of that right, even if it might otherwise be legal.

That logic isn't obviously correct. People do not have a right to go about in public, to and from notorious places, in a 2-ton death monster that requires licensure and indemnification to operate, anonymously. People requiring a higher degree of privacy than that offered by cars would be better served taking their bicycles.

I would argue that a de facto right to privacy is created by the nature of the destination. It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

I would argue that your moon-man jurisprudence is weird.

> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting...

> It doesn't matter if someone can see you or your car, the fact that it's a medical destination should create a right to privacy of that trip.

So what you're saying is that the government should enforce a built-in gag order on people? Interesting...

They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA. A right to privacy has to include the right to prevent others from disclosing certain kinds of information about oneself. You could also consider it from a defamation/slander/libel perspective.

> They already do with regard to medical information, in the form of HIPAA.

HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside.

To the extent that a given condition is public people are allowed to note that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for instance.

HIPAA type records are not publically displayed when people walk outside.

No, but there are some things that ostensibly take place in public but should still be considered private, absent some urgently pressing higher need that can only be met by disclosure.

To the extent that a given condition is public people are allowed to note that. This is why assholes were legally allowed to call me pimple-face, for instance.

At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment, or bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school policies, and thus not be considered free speech?

In general I believe people should be able to say anything they want, but if what they say or to whom they say it violates someone else's rights, their victims shouldn't have to put up with it.

> At some point of excess, wouldn't that fall under verbal abuse, harassment, or bullying, depending on whether you're considering laws or school policies, and thus not be considered free speech?

Perhaps. But should that point come the speech will lose protection because it is abusive, harassing, or bullying nature. Not because it describes my medical condition.

It's not legally possible for a random citizen to get personal information from a license plate, so having someone's license plate number available isn't a violation of their right to privacy.

His point is that this metadata has one intended use, and that it is not supposed to be re-purposed to aid in the harassment of the people you disagree with.

Even if someone thought such actions were unreasonable, I have no idea how you'd use the law to prevent it.

In this century, we certainly can: do not have license plates at all, use radio beacons instead, which send encrypted copies of the plate. The police would be allowed to request decryption from the DMV (e.g., "running the plates"), and a few other authorized people, but the general public could not. The secret keys would be the weak point, and would have to be held only in a limited number of DMV data centers (which would help in establishing an audit trail when plates are accessed).

I'm not saying it is necessarily something that should be done, but it certainly can be done.

And if you see a hit and run, good luck helping the other guy out by "grabbing his plate number"

I'm not sure that would be so hard to solve. You can record the ciphertext plate and give that to the police.

Really the question is, "How important is this problem? Do we care about license plate privacy?"

A license plate is already essentially encrypted. It's a random sequence of letters and numbers that correspond with a unique individual's information. It contains no personal information in itself.

Except that your car shows everyone the same license plate every time they look at it. This would be completely unacceptable for a cryptographic solution, which would use fresh randomness to respond to every request (in theory).

Sure, but then how do you tell the police that you just saw a black SUV with Massachusetts plates ending is 907 blow through a red light and almost run down an old lady with a cane at 7th and main? How would they ever find the driver or owner?

While there are many ways to abuse the fact that license plates are publicly-visible (the aforementioned abortion protester being one example), there are still very legitimate reasons they should continue to be that way (holding people responsible for their actions when they infringe on the rights of others, as in my example). This isn't to say that we should always and forever attach a stamped piece of metal to cars, but the current system does have the advantage of being compatible with the Mk. I Eyeball.

While we're on the subject of a slippery slope of increasing police power, we might as well assume that eventually the people will have zero power and zero responsibility with regard to crime. In this hypothetical future, you won't need to tell the police you saw a black SUV almost run down a pedestrian; it's a police problem. This is the illogical end of abdicating personal responsibility in favor of total surveillance.

With a system like that, the intersection itself would be capable of logging the passing of every vehicle: time, direction, speed. There is no escape.

Maybe I am naive but it seems like there would be a pretty small sub-set of the population that could actually do anything with someone's plate number that would be an abuse of the system. There isn't some publicly available API into the DMV records is there?

Yes, the plate number on your vehicle is publicly available data. But I don't see how that is very usefully. I'm not sure there is any way for a random person to do anything with a plate number. It would require the person to have some sort of connection to the DMV or other agency that has access to your name and address based on the plate number. And those people are still not going to have access to your medical records even if they did manage to get your name and address just by knowing your plate number.

EDIT: the bit about getting at medical records seeped in from reading another comment.

I doubt an anti-abortion protestor who is collecting license plate numbers is doing it to get a hold of medical records. They have already made their "judgement".

Should they not be allowed to collect that information?

I'm curious as well, additionally how would this be enforced. In addition the collection isn't the issue, its what you do with that information after the fact that tends to be the issue at hand.

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