[pdkl95]

Privacy isn't a simple Boolean value; there are degrees of privacy that depend on what's protected, the environment/situation, cultural expectations and awareness, and many other variables. For example, you expect privacy for your body because you wear clothes, even though you "have no expectation of privacy" because you are in public.

When the laws requiring license plates were originally created, there was a certain understanding about how that would impact society. Sure, anybody could see them, but you needed a lot of expensive manpower to track one person for a long time or everybody at any time. The impact of having the data "in public" was inherently limited.

Now that technology has removed that limitation, the consequences of having a license plate in public view have changed. Pretending that this new situation is addressed with the outdated logic we used to define "no pubic expectation of privacy" assumes that the old definitions of privacy are still valid, which is patently incorrect.