| ▲ | AdmiralAsshat 12 hours ago |
| With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation? |
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| ▲ | dragonwriter 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation? For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it. |
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| ▲ | pests 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them. |
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| ▲ | 747fulloftapes 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This is intentionally not PII. You accept this burden when you decide to register a vehicle. Keep in mind you don't need to have a license plate or to register a vehicle to drive it only on private property. Your license plate is required to be readily visible so that it can be used to find out who the registered and, presumably, responsible party is. Consider if you skip out on paying for parking at a garage, where you agreed to pay the fee by parking there in the first place. How is the business supposed to identify you to collect the money owed? Otherwise, how else would automatic private toll roads know where to send the bill? In Michigan, I believe the law only permits someone to request registration details for certain listed reasons. They don't verify that, but if you're caught submitting a fraudulent request, you can get in trouble - I don't know if it's a fine or crime. Probably depends on the circumstance. PS Hello from Grand Rapids! | |
| ▲ | antonvs 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) If the car is leased, wouldn’t this just give leasing company details? | | |
| ▲ | 747fulloftapes 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, because while the leasing company may own the vehicle (known as the title holder) the vehicle will be registered in the lesser's name (known as the registered owner.) In the case of a car purchased with financing like a loan, I believe the purchaser will be both the title and registered owner, but the lender will have a lien on the vehicle until the debt is paid off. | | |
| ▲ | antonvs 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ah thanks. Permanent rental it is then. :) | | |
| ▲ | 747fulloftapes 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That, or, establish a trust to own the vehicle and grant yourself permission to use it. It's not exactly trivial to do and costs some money, but it's doable. You can do similar with an LLC, but that gets more complicated with the rules regarding using a "company" vehicle for personal purposes. IANAL Similar things are done for things like cellphone plans, firearm ownership, homes, etc. The only thing I am aware of that you can only do in your own name is register to vote. Almost all of the Michigan voter database can be FOIA'd. It's called the QVF - qualified voter file. Only a few fields in the database (ie, day and month of birth) as well as all voter records for victoms domestic battery are protected by statute. | |
| ▲ | kotaKat 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pay a thousand bucks to a Montana agent to register you an pseudoanonymous LLC and put an old 90s Corolla into an LLC with a permanent registration plate (since anything 15+ years old can have a 'perm' plate on it. Then never think about it again. | | |
| ▲ | 747fulloftapes 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | While some people do get away with this, it carries some risk. Without using an LLC, most every state requires you to register your vehicle where you live within 30-90 days with some exceptions (ie college students). Even with the LLC, if you catch the attention of the state, I believe you might be risking being charged with tax evasion even if your goal was to protect your privacy. This is especially true if you can't prove the LLC to be a legitimate business venture. Yeah, the Corolla won't be mistaken for a supercar, but many states have begun cracking down on residents with Montana plates such as Georgia, Ohio, and New York. Also, insuring a car with out of state registration can be committing insurance fraud. Rates and fees are different between states due to different regulations. Further, depending on your policy, the insurer could deny claims because the car wasn't garaged in the state it was registered. Really, if the privacy is of sufficient priority, the best solution is to just do things properly and move to rural Montana instead. |
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| ▲ | edm0nd 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| You just work backwards. Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT. I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data. If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner. There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details. Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually. |
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| ▲ | monerozcash 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, and so what? You can look up people on Accurint without license plates. Depending on what kind of account you have, you can just search by a zip code, or a state with no further identifiers. What would be the point of running a website collecting the license plate numbers of random visitors? | | |
| ▲ | diydsp 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You need to think more evil! Lets brainstorm! Theres a parking lot... what are the 10 wealthiest car owners...and the 10 frailest oldest people... or maybe the 20 women aged 19-25 blond under 150 pounds... and when do they get off work tired, drive home each day? What's the most isolated gas station,convenience store they stop at? Ones where few other cars pass by? Who's homes don't show a 2nd car in driveway? Owned by 6'5" 200 pound man? Who frequently visits a karate studio? Or: im a car salesman, in comes a customer, whining abt lowering the price bc Theyre broke... lemme just look up where they eat supper every night! How much time they spend at airports! What school they drop off their kids! Who comes to their house? Nannies? Oh look drug dealers, i can threaten them with blackmail! Sound ridiculous? All the data brings it into focus. A local detective told me theyre focusing on robberies of $ethnicity restaurants bc that group stockpiles cash in their homes... And this is all assuming good info, but when u get creative: ..what if we look for mistakes... hey that annoying $religious neighbor pissed me off with his loud music. His kids car shows up as visiting thr wrong side of town..probably a wrong digit but lets report him anyway!!! Or:
Hey lets scan all the wifi dbs for ssids that seem like defaults, then offer them csam-insurance: you pay me $1000 cash rn and ill insure i dont browse csam from your network! And my alpr data says when youre home and your iot devs tell me when you go to sleep so we'll slip it in at before-bed-wank-time! | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Oh no, I can think very evil. I just don't see what kind of evil thinking would arrive at "Hey lets use this website to collect IP address/license plate pairs at a small scale" That just doesn't strike me as a very efficient way of doing evil. You can just go on accurint and find the oldest people living alone in the richest neighbourhoods near you. You can even fairly reliably find out whether or not they have living relatives. All this deeply sensitive data is already readily available. I don't think IP+license plate data would be particularly interesting unless you're Google and able to gather that at an absolutely massive scale. But even then, you'd be using it for extremely boring kinds of evil. |
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| ▲ | rightbyte 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Pairing IPs to persons? | | |
| ▲ | monerozcash 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can just get an API which does that and skip the middle steps? Or even skip the API part and just buy that data in bulk. Or just collect it from a variety of freely leaked databases. |
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| ▲ | JohnFen 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII. |
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| ▲ | ccgreg 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most people park at their home and many drive to work. If you have both of those data points, you can identify people. |
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| ▲ | mertd 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's not very useful? For homeowners, the real estate transactions are public and majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts. | | |
| ▲ | ccgreg 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So, from home and work, you identify me. Then you figure out which church I attend, and which strip club I attend. | | |
| ▲ | interloxia 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Wait, user compliance scan identified location traces associated with participitation in community groups prohibited by EasyLife Health™ policy update 2025-12-06b. Recommend to annul contract." |
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| ▲ | jwiz 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You're starting with the plate, getting the home, and then you can get the real estate info. Most people don't expect their identity to be discoverable from their driving. | | |
| ▲ | Ylpertnodi 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Isn't that the whole idea of licence plates?
So you're identifiable? | |
| ▲ | ragequittah 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Wait really? I feel like this was happening in the 90s. Now every car has a full gps spy system integrated to the point I barely trust that my conversation is private in a modern vehicle. But I guess if you think it's just your car company, Android, Apple, roadside assistance, the local police, and probably the music you're playing that can pin your location you're probably ok. |
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| ▲ | drnick1 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > majority of white collar people have LinkedIn accounts. What a time to live in! | | |
| ▲ | hopelite 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | LinkedIn has always struck me like a kind of contemporary slave management/market place, only one in which pick-mes try to be the best alpha slave they can be. The fact that you are linked in, as in a chain, sure does not help with dispelling my impression. |
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| ▲ | rogerrogerr 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Exactly - you can collect license plates numbers way easier than this. The best data they can really get is a connection to an IP address. |
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| ▲ | amazingman 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Checksum? |
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| ▲ | CamperBob2 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Sell it to the cops and/or ICE as belonging to "self-identified persons of interest." |
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