Presumably because it could help a stalker/angry-person track the poster down. It's not as blatant as posting your address, but it's not far short. It's also conceivable that it's not the posters that blur the numbers but the platforms (though I've no evidence whether any do or don't).

In Scandinavian countries road authorities have a publicly accessible service where you can get the name, address, and phone number of the license plate owner. So there's that.

@Index: the same is possible in Switzerland (link in German or Italian), unless you block your info, for which you need a written application. That said, I think your comment would make for a good answer. (I'm not writing one up because Switzerland is not in the EU.)

"people also do it on platforms where they are identifiable anyways (Facebook, car selling platforms etc.)" - presumably, these people expect their photos to possibly turn up in other places and are sufficiently fine with that, as long as the photo is an "anonymous" photo without a trail leading back to them.

I can walk down the street and gather any number of license plates, including all of the context clues that people seem worried about. Can someone provide an answer that clearly differentiates (beyond just "making it slightly easier for bad guys") why it's worth hiding something online that's freely and obviously available in the real world?

I suspect a lot of the people doing it on selling platforms are doing it just because others are doing it, without an active worry for anything in particular. "Well if he blocked his plate, he must've had a good reason, I'll block mine too".

I cannot tell you how it is in other countries, but in germany you can tell in whitch city the car was registered. So if you don't want the internet to know in which city you live you have to censor your license plate.

In Italy license plates are considered PI and it's a crime to publish them.

Also people in Germany especially value their privacy greatly: 40percentgerman.com/home/2017/8/21/…

"Nobody but appropriated authorities can get any data out of it" is trivially false in many countries. And for dwizum - on the street it's obviously much harder to associate the information from the licence plate with an online or offline identity.

@dwizum big difference if you need to locally go there and only get the plates from your surrounding or whether a) you can search the net for a car you saw, find the plate, identify the owner and go beat him up for overtaking you, or b) you are looking for the address of someone you want to meet because their pics on instagram are so sexy and you can do so via the plate or c) a lot of people find your car that you or someone else put online and now you get 10 calls a day for a week from people that want to buy it or take pictures with it.

@Turkeyphant - I would disagree that it's harder to associate the license plate with an identity. In fact, I'd say it's easier - I'm sitting in a building with 500 other people, all 501 of our cars in the parking lot - I can easily learn a ton about the identities of the owners of those 500 license plates. Honestly, I think the only difference is the population you're exposing to whom.

@FrankHopkins - sorry, I think your first counter-example at least is just further reinforcing my point. If I get cut off by another car, why on earth would I go try to look up that car on the internet in order to learn what the plate was, when the plate is literally right in front of my face during the moment of confrontation (when you've cut me off)? I'll just snap a photo of your license plate with my phone. Or follow you home! Whether or not you've hidden your plate in a photo on facebook isn't going to reduce my ability to know who you are.

you might not have gotten the plate, but we both left the same car festival, so you're flipping through facebook pictures until you find me and my car. But yes, take any reason to beat me up where you didn't see my plate but you find a pic with me and my plate, it makes chances to identify my address definitely larger. and that's only the cases where you actually met me before, there's plenty of stuff to try and pull with people you just got an online discussion with and feel angered.

Don't forget that in many EU countries dashcams are illegal because they can record number plates and therefore violate privacy. In other countries dashcams must contain plate pixelating software for the same reason. There is a draft EU directive that proposes banning dashcam recording of plates in the whole EU.

Simple due diligence? What's the harm? I use an alias here even though my real name is probably not hard to figure out. But advertising something is not the same as it being fundamentally available with some extra effort.

You may not b able to get any more data from the plate, that's not the case for some of us ;) It ain't just the police that can find stuff.