DennisMitchell

What are the reasons why people block out license plate numbers from their posts?

superswiss

Should You Bother Obscuring Your License Plates In Photos?

DennisMitchell

Thanks for the link.

I am in the camp that if you drive your car on the street for strangers to see, why wouldn't you display your plates to the user community that you actively participate. Only exception is if you are a celebrity, I can see that forum activity could be awkward.

But folks can do what they like.

superswiss

Well, I think the main point is the one made in that article, that your exposing your license plate to a potentially much larger audience. Your car becomes searchable as an image, so somebody who is targeting a certain brand of cars could just search the Internet and then use the license plates to get the owner information including address. The Internet adds a much larger scale to anything you do in public.

Google Street View for example blurs all the license plates. If they didn't do that, let's say you got caught on one of those Google Street View cameras. Even though you were in public view it's now for the entire world to see that you were in a certain place.

I think it comes down to how you personally feel about your license plate being on the Internet for everybody to see, including somebody who may have some beef with you.

hamz01

I do it cuz I've seen others do it, so I'd be all paranoid otherwise. Probably nothing would happen though, of course. I have posted car pics on Facebook and not felt the need to obscure the license plate there.

lordjop

Looking at your post i realized that the photos I took of my car obscure the first half of my own plate. This was unintentional. Looking at this and other forums from different auto makers, i think the #1 reason people hide their plates is that if their car fails due to extreme modding they can go back to the dealer for warranty service.

I read on a different forum, not sure if it was an E90 M3 or a Golf R, where someone modded their car and actually had videos on Youtube and other media outlets bragging about how fast their car was. If i recall correctly he modded the car after 25,000 or so miles. Due the the severe driving his engine blew. Not sure if it was the turbo or connecting rods or whatever but took it to the dealership for an "under warranty repair." They found out about the modding and they also saw his video's / posts with his car.