New here.... My current rides....

[TT]

(In the U.S.) if you have a plate number, you can lookup the name, address, social security and things like this of the owner. With the social security # especially and the other info, alot of bad things can be done like identity theft. Its just a chain of gaining more and more info which lead to them using your credit card, etc.

But the fact is that EVERYBODY can see the plate of the cars while parked in front of your house or while driving it!! Where is the point in hiding them on the net? You should also hide them when you use the car!

[yg60m]

I think that one of the reasons for which the owners who lend their cars to magazines ask so that one hide the plates is a tax reason. Because, controllers of the taxes could be tempted to ... control the person who has an expensive car by seeing it in a mag or on TV.
But i am maybe wrong and it's surely not the only reason.

[Smahatma]

Originally Posted by TT (In the U.S.) if you have a plate number, you can lookup the name, address, social security and things like this of the owner. With the social security # especially and the other info, alot of bad things can be done like identity theft. Its just a chain of gaining more and more info which lead to them using your credit card, etc. But the fact is that EVERYBODY can see the plate of the cars while parked in front of your house or while driving it!! Where is the point in hiding them on the net? You should also hide them when you use the car!

of course this is true that anyone that crosses your local path can see the license plate, but when its printed in a magazine or on the internet, you have just introduced it to a much much much bigger viewerbase (now the whole nation, or even the world), giving more potential for bad things to happen. Generally the victims of identity/credit theft are in a different part of the country or world than the perpetrator because they are much harder to catch that way.