This is one of those things that's annoying to talk about, reason about, and legislate against because our intuition fails us when thinking about emergent behaviors. Some examples:
1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.
2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.
3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.
4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.
5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.
Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:
1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.
2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.
To clarify: I don't care about the emergent behaviors to the extent that I would somehow make license plates private, which is a completely impractical idea.
The identifying info attached to license plates can be kept safeguarded. Even so, license plates can be used to fingerprint a vehicle. Eyewitnesses can attach identities to license plates; e.g. you can easily know the license plates of acquantances such as neigbors and recognize them in a different context.
Some kind of technological solution of nonce license plates. They would have to use display technology, making them fragile, poorly visible, prone to various malfunctions.
I think lots of these issues are scale issues. Most people agree having some sort of weapon is fine up to a point.. that point may be a knife or a rifle but most folks probably think private citizens shouldn’t have tactical nuclear weapons.
Likewise, license plates are fine, full real-time surveillance of all movement in your country probably not great and not something the public wants.
Almost of these slippery slope issues are scaling problems, especially in privacy. Tracking people with cookies at your site, probably fine, using third party cookies to track everything your visit on the internet, maybe less great. Etc etc.
Legislating scale seems to be something that is particularly difficult since it’s easily argued, as you did, that’s it’s not inherently bad.
1. OKAY: Telling your boss that you saw his car with his license plate on the freeway.
2. WORSE BUT STILL NOT BAD: Telling some friends and coworkers how crazy it is that you ran into your boss's car on the freeway.
3. NOT OKAY: Using a camera network to report on your boss's license plate location in real time.
4. VERY NOT OKAY: Using that extra information to conclude that his wife is pregnant and that he's job searching, selling him out at your current employer for some financial advantage.
5. EVEN WORSE: Doing that to literally everyone, coupled with a side of illegal and scammy advertisements just for good measure.
Our society depends heavily on some things staying reasonably private. You're right a single piece of license plate information isn't that important. What's happening though is some combination of:
1. Attempting to combat companies who don't give a rip about privacy and are keen to exploit loopholes (and for a host of other reasons), the law is stricter than it needs to be.
2. Once somebody else has committed a felony you usually have a lot more leeway with respect to your ensuing actions. Unless you've ever frowned in the direction of Trump, no prosecutor will hold that against you, and nearly every judge will throw it out. You'll want a stronger example.