Who has my vanity plate?

[rockbottom]

And now that my application is on its way to PennDOT, what I've asked for is "HEXED"

Good choice! Is the irony (ref this conversation) intentional?

Yep. I'm big on self deprecation. It's so easy.

[PhilSB]

I've just bought a plate for the BMW 325D that I've got on order for September. PS 58 ELL - PS S BELL ( Philip Stephen & Sheila Bell) We have a funny number plate system in the UK. If you respace the characters and the ANPR cameras can't read them you get a £60 fine. I hadn't thought about one for the bike. I'll have to give it some thought.

Phil

[Sander Abernathy]

While I did actually post my custom plate here, I did so against my better judgement. I generally habitually blank my plate out of photos.

It's not because of the tinfoil hat, and the principal is poorly understood by armchair pundits who don't really realize what privacy (in the electronic sense) actually is.

The goal is not to make your license plate a secret. Obviously, to function as a legal license plate, it has to be visible when you're out riding on the street. Thousands of people a day see it. This is not the issue. Anyone who says "what's the point" is missing the point, or perhaps willfully ignorant.

The issue with license plates as it relates to privacy is that any two pieces of information that can be connected are significantly more powerful than those pieces are in isolation. If I know someone's name, it's not a big deal -- it's just a name. If I see a BMW R1200R with a particular license plate out on the street, it's also no big deal. Just another license plate in a sea of license plates.

If I know that a person with a particular name has a BMW R1200R with a specific license plate number, I now have exponentially more useful information than I did before. This may not seem like a lot, but those pieces are now connected and may now be used in more powerful ways. Add a home address and a telephone number and I've got the makings of a social engineering hack. When you post things like your license plate in a public form where you also use (or have occasionally mentioned) your real name, you are making connections about your life that someone can use against you. If the picture happens to be in your driveway and shows your house number, well... let's just say that Google Street View is a pretty powerful tool.

The point is that the information in isolation isn't very important. In order to ensure electronic privacy, we must be careful not to make the connections between pieces of data too easily obtained. That's the point.

Let's see. I use my real name here. The URL for my website is my name and it includes my phone number. My home address is online at the secretary of state's website for my professional license. My license plate on my car indicates which college I went to. I guess I'm on the other end of the spectrum on this issue.

I agree that multiple pieces of information about someone are more valuable than a single piece of information. I would debate whether the value increases exponentially. I have all available information about me and that hasn't produced anything approaching an exponential increase in my value or the value of what I have.

However, if someone has 50 pieces of information about me, what are they going to do with it? I just haven't heard of anyone doing anything to victimize someone by using their license plate number in conjunction with other pieces of information.

I've been a victim of identify theft before. Someone stole a box of new checks out of the mail, had a fake ID created with my name on it and wrote $15k of checks on my bank account. I will admit that it was quite a shock psychologically but we had the money back in our account the next day and we weren't out a penny. It was actually more trouble to order the box of checks in the first place than to get our money back.

The police ultimately caught him when a retailer called me at home to verify "my" identity and confirm that I was in the store returning goods for cash. On the day of the trial he called and said he couldn't make it because his wife was having a baby. That was the end of the whole thing as the prosecuter just gave up.

So I guess I miss the point.

Your friend

Willfully Ignorant

[jess]

I would debate whether the value increases exponentially. I have all available information about me and that hasn't produced anything approaching an exponential increase in my value or the value of what I have.

I would argue that without all those pieces of connected information you have about yourself, you'd be hard pressed to function on a day-to-day basis. So yes, I think that information is probably exponentially valuable to you.

Remember though, we're talking about malicious intent. If nobody has any reason to use the information maliciously, then you're in the clear. Until they do. And then you're not.

And again, you're all free to post whatever you want. I'm trying to give you some insight into why people blank their license plates. If you choose not to, that's your right. But ridicule for those who do is uncalled for, especially by those who have demonstrated a willful ignorance of the concepts involved in electronic privacy.

[rokinrider]

After some more Farlkles I'm going for CRUZMISL or some variation of it

[famousperson]

And again, you're all free to post whatever you want. I'm trying to give you some insight into why people blank their license plates. If you choose not to, that's your right. But ridicule for those who do is uncalled for, especially by those who have demonstrated a willful ignorance of the concepts involved in electronic privacy.

Jess, I started this discussion and I wasn't ridiculing anybody. I merely said I didn't understand why people did it. I now understand why you do, and it's fine with me. I even agree with your hypothesis that the more bits of information there are about you "out there," the easier it is for someone to find out everything. My position is that I refuse to be paranoid about it. There is already so much information about me floating around in the ether that I'm dead meat whether or not I blank out my licence plate.

[Sander Abernathy]

I would debate whether the value increases exponentially. I have all available information about me and that hasn't produced anything approaching an exponential increase in my value or the value of what I have.

I would argue that without all those pieces of connected information you have about yourself, you'd be hard pressed to function on a day-to-day basis. So yes, I think that information is probably exponentially valuable to you.

Remember though, we're talking about malicious intent. If nobody has any reason to use the information maliciously, then you're in the clear. Until they do. And then you're not.

And again, you're all free to post whatever you want. I'm trying to give you some insight into why people blank their license plates. If you choose not to, that's your right. But ridicule for those who do is uncalled for, especially by those who have demonstrated a willful ignorance of the concepts involved in electronic privacy.

I wasn't intending to ridicule either. Sorry if it came across that way.

[rockbottom]