[mothballed]

How about a law that says your documents, like your car registration number on a plate, doesn't have to be displayed except in case of reasonable articulable suspicion a crime has been committed. We could call it, the 4th amendment.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving).

So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.

It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.

[janalsncm]

Sure, but for decades the license plate was an implicit social contract of functional pseudonymity: a random string of characters that for almost everyone on a day to day basis meant the government wasn’t tracking your whereabouts but could identify you if they really wanted to (at a stop).

So what people are really reacting to is the government using technical means to change the terms of that social contract without our input.

Same thing with Flock. People do the whole civic engagement thing and cities still sign contracts anyways.

A lot of people wouldn’t even be opposed if the whole thing was on a ballot measure. It becomes a problem when the government decides they no longer need consent of the governed.

[xboxnolifes]

In the US, driving is a hard sell to call a privilege. It's basically a necessity. When society is designed around the assumption of getting around by car, it's no longer a privilege.

Also,

> So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.

You paid for a bit of the infrastructure being driven on just by being a tax payer.

[tardedmeme]

That's one of the best ways to do business. You take something that is technically a privilege, turn it into a necessity, and then charge through the nose for it. It makes you very rich and very powerful.

[themafia]

> driving is a privilege

Yet you can have a license without owning a car. They don't issue you a plate to use. So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle. The plates are tied to a vehicle to prevent the obvious "plate swapping" attack that people would use against this regime.

> roof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure

Actually those are gas and sales taxes, are they not?

> you're required to wear the wrist band.

The wrist band need not have a unique identifier readable from several feet away emblazoned on it in order to function.

[freedomben]

> So the plate is clearly for something else, mainly I think, to indicate that you've paid the appropriate registration fees on the vehicle.

I think it's so they can identify the car owner quickly and easily and hold them liable for any law violations or damage. And of courese, at least partially (or ostensibly) for revenue generation and taxation purposes (though if that's all it was for, just using the VIN would make more sense IMHO, which is why I suspect it's more for the former).

[mothballed]

>Your plate is displayed because driving is a privilege, not a right (note that traveling is a right, but you can travel without driving).

But the 4th amendment is a right, that applies even when engaging in a "privilege." See also the fact police can't just willy nilly check your driver license while engaging in a "privilege."

>So your plate is really the proof that you've paid a bit for the infrastructure to drive on.

False.

Plates are required even on my own privately owned publicly accessible road, and a large portion of my trips happen on publicly available but 100% privately owned roads with 0 taxes to maintain them (in fact, I maintain a lot of the roads in my community myself because they are all private). In fact some of those roads, I 100% own and maintain, and yet since I legally can't bar anyone from driving on it the law in my state (AZ) requires a displayed plate (even for me).

>It's like having a wrist band to an event. You're not required to attend the event, but if you do attend it, you're required to wear the wrist band.

It's like citing me for not having a wrist band on my own owned road easement, which is the law in my state. There is no property right you are attempting to assert under which that makes sense. I can go about 90% of the way to "town" on privately owned roads in which none of the owners care if I have a "wrist band" yet the state can still cite me for not having it.

[brewdad]

The fact that the road is legally accessible to the public makes it a public road for the sake of this discussion. You must have a license plate to drive on a public road. It really isn’t any more complicated than that.

It doesn’t matter whether the road in front of my house is owned by the federal government, state, county, city, or Bob, I and everyone else is allowed to drive on it, so it’s a public road.

[hsuduebc2]

Car is a neccesity in this country.

US is certainly not known for it's public transportation and walkable cities.

[modriano]

Cars are also lethal weapons and around 1 out of every ~83 deaths in the US is a traffic death (~38k traffic deaths/yr, ~3M total deaths/yr). It's good to keep track of cars given how dangerous they are.

[janalsncm]

I’ll throw you an olive branch and say the registration sticker is completely pointless. The source of truth for whether my car is registered is in a database, not on a sticker. Someone can steal your sticker which results in a false positive for the thief and a false negative (and huge headache) for the victim.

[Melatonic]

True - but couldn't the same be said for ID then ? Just memorise your license number - cops have been able to look it up in their car computer for years. Saved me at least once.

Typically also they don't even bother with looking at your registration unless the sticker is way out of date

[janalsncm]

There isn’t a simple mapping between IDs and car registrations. You can borrow a friend’s car without telling the government about it.

[aetch]

The point of a plate is to publicly identify the vehicle at all times, not just when you feel like it

[foobiekr]

The tech companies will just use face recognition, tracing, gait recognition, unique properties (like scratches) etc. etc. for the same purpose, same way they pioneered browser fingerprinting.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

They will find something else to track you by. I think the idea of no expectation of privacy in public doesn't work anymore with the available tech.