Why obscure license plates

If anything, check your local laws to see what they say about covering your license plate, but chances are, they will probably say something to the same effect. Either way, we suggest staying on the right side of the law because you can get pulled over and fined for it.

Another tactic you might consider is to remove your front license plate to maybe at least thwart some of those pesky cameras. The form does list a set of permissible uses, such as driver safety, theft, hiring commercial drivers, etc. This method is still an improvement over how it used to be.

Prior to , it was easier to get home addresses from DMV records, and this was the method by which the man who murdered Rebecca Schaeffer , an actress from the 90s television show My Sister Sam , got her home address and related information. This murder led to the creation of the Drivers' Privacy Protection Act of Private, paid services don't even care if you're a creepy murderer or not— they just take your money and send you the information. Now, this information isn't your blood type and a list of your deepest, most secretest fears, but the possibility to get your address can be worrying.

As for the argument that your plate is already visible to anyone walking by your car, that's certainly true. It's just that the internet can so vastly expand the number of people able to see your license plate that it may become an issue. Still, as Officer Mosqueda told me with a certain degree of poetry, "You can't blur out real life. Officer Mosqueda's final advice?

In the location section, did you list your full address? If not, you probably did that for a reason. It might not even make any difference at all. But if you share enough of your life online, any savvy criminal can spend a few hours and build a profile on you. Where you live. Where you work. What you drive. Other expensive belongings you might own. Social media, forum posts, and your license plate make their job even easier. As car guys, we love to share details of our vehicles with other car guys.

Blurring our license plates in photos allows us to use these without making ourselves vulnerable. Who can access it? So you should be pretty safe, right? I wish that were the case. Whether you choose to believe it or not, corruption is everywhere. The people mentioned above all have friends and family members. Some of which, they might owe a favor or two. They could also be an employee by day and a criminal by night.

No system is perfect. Here in Canada, you can file a request for info on a license plate with the MTO. It will give you a postal code, but not a complete address. The good news is, they have to give their own personal info in order to get yours. I was able to find a photo of a car with an exposed license plate and run a lookup on a 3rd party site in less than 5 minutes. Admittedly, most of these lookup websites are scams. This info is likely outdated and applies to a previous owner of the vehicle.

However, hiring a licensed investigator for a low fee should return plenty of current, private info. Blurring a license plate in Photoshop is quick and easy. Google street view blurs license plates. You can see this image near Lambeau in Green Bay in which the license plate of the SUV in the bottom left hand corner is clearly blurred. As I cruised around Google street view I noticed that they blurred out all license plates. The writer concludes:. Check out how to blur license plates in photoshop to see how I do it.