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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). |