[Blackavar]

I don't personally think it's a great outcome - in fact I think it's a pretty bad one.

However, I do think that that the outcome of universal access to surveillance is the best one that has any slim likelihood at all of coming to pass - all of the other actually possible outcomes are worse.

[DerpDerpDerp]

I disagree with you.

The likely outcome of this kind of openness law is that powerful and wealthy people use a car service, making them untrackable, while poor people are stuck being tracked not only by the currently powerful, but anyone that feels like attempting to gain power over them.

You've simply widened the market for who can exploit the data without causing any damage to the people who initially did so - something I think is strictly worse than the current state of affairs.

[Blackavar]

If you disagree, can you provide a desired end point that you believe actually protects privacy, and a roadmap to get to this point?

I personally don't see a path to an end point where there is no collection and aggregation of personal data, be it by state actors, corporations, or private citizens.

The actual most likely outcome that I see is official regulation of personal data collection and aggregation by corporations and private citizens as in the EU. Those laws explicitly allow state actors to actively collect and aggregate tracking data.

However, nothing technical actually prevents corporate and private actors from doing so, at the cost of a fine if they are caught. The actions that might have some effect on data collection (like obscuring license plates) are prohibited by laws that ease the collection of data by state actors.

This will continue to be exploited, although additional resources available to certain groups - the wealthy, those associated with corporations and state actors, and (to some extent) the technically skilled that put much of their available skills and resources toward staying private - will enable concealing of some private data.

This is already essentially the current state of affairs, though. Anyone with the required resources can use either legal, quasi-legal, or illegal means to do this sort of thing. Note the recent discussion of the system for intel available to repo operators.

[DerpDerpDerp]

I believe that we'll see a prohibition on government non-targeted surveillance in the United States, and a rise in ZipCar and Car2Go style services (effectively, short term rentals) by people who are concerned by this kind of tracking (or investment in and use of public transport). I expect that garage parking (and other enclosed vehicle storage) will increase, and work its way down through the socioeconomic ladder, as well as simple techniques such as automated plate covers.

I expect that we won't see any kind of effective prohibition on corporate or private behavior, at least in the United States, but contend that various measures mentioned above are reasonably effective at curbing this as well. (This could be aided by amending laws to say that plates must only be visible while the vehicle is actively driving on the road.)

Ideally, privacy preserving laws, which recognize the fundamental role of anonymity in society would be enacted, but I find this unlikely to actually happen in the US.

Ultimately, there are limits on what people care about, and anonymity is one of the things that requires cover traffic and statistical noise to be effective. However, I do think there are things that concerned people can do to raise the bar on collecting information about individual - ie, use ZipCar, start services which bulk order things off Amazon and ship to a locker/mailbox facility, etc. These won't necessarily stop someone looking in to what you're doing, in particular, from tracking you, but they increase the difficulty sufficiently to make bulk tracking difficult (assuming wide enough adoption).

The fundamental problem, just like it is online, is that anonymity and signal mixing needs to be built in to the system, and that's just kind of inconvenient. So it requires people to proactively do it, even when they're not hiding, and tends to just not get done (often enough).