[elmuchoprez]

Maybe I'm alone here, but I never had an expectation of privacy in regards to what I write on the outside of a envelope and drop into a public receptacle (mailbox). I expect the contents to be considered highly private, but not the outside.

There's also this issue of willing disclosure of information to an entity. When I put a stamp on something and drop it in the mailbox, I know I'm handing that information over to a government authority (or whatever you want to call the USPS's weird relationship to the government). Regardless of what they are or aren't supposed to do with it, the fact is that I know I'm putting my info in their hands and trusting them. This is unlike PRISM, where I send an email through Gmail with no expectation that it should ever pass through government hands.

Also, I'm under the impression that most if not all hand-written addresses are digitized for sorting purposes. I think you have to be naive to assume the postal service wasn't keeping that data on file.

[nmcfarl]

Scope matters.

It’s quite different to assume that people can look at the outside of any particular letter, than it is to assume that people are building a database of all your mail, and doing social network analysis on it.

The results of the 2 actions are radically different, with radically different amounts of information gleaned.

[devindotcom]

Isn't that rather like the argument used regarding the JSTOR data, which we all rejected vehemently?

[asdf3]

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

[thrownaway2424]

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

[nitrogen]

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.

[thrownaway2424]

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.

[nitrogen]

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.

[mpyne]

> 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...

[thrownaway2424]

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

[ceol]

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.

[lightbritefight]

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.

[elmuchoprez]

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

[betterunix]

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.

[bathat]

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.

[nitrogen]

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.

[jack-r-abbit]

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?

[nisse72]

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.

[reustle]

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

[betterunix]

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?"

[ceol]

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.

[jack-r-abbit]

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.

[jlgreco]

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".

[namlem]

Should they not be allowed to collect that information?

[mitchty]

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.

[pfortuny]

The fact that some people are "naive" does not imply what they expect to be stupid or unnecessary.

Anyone could argue for censorship and for reading your letters: "it is because of the children"... You are putting them in the hands of the USPS.