Why do people hide their number plates?

If I was going to put fake plates on a car, and could find a couple of examples of the right make, model and colour on Google... it's a heck of a lot easier than trawling Tesco car park hunting for one.
 
One reason is as above especially with the amount of meta data google, etc. produces - but also if people have a somewhat desirable car especially if its a limited run it makes it easier for someone upto no good to narrow down where they can find one to nick.
 
I never used to bother, but since I deleted my Photobucket account I've decided to start doing it with any new photos I host from now on. Nothing to do with worries about cloning, I'd just rather not have my registration number easily linked to anything I post online. Might be a little paranoid, but as I will generally edit/resize any images I post, it takes only a few extra seconds to blur the plate.
 
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With someones reg you can now check online if its taxed and look through the MOT history, is there anyway you can find out where it lives?

I blur mine out but my car is quite rare and i'd rather be safe than sorry as quite a few have been stolen recently never to be seen again.
 
Stop cloning on certain types of vehicles, if your car has anything to make it look different to normal i.e different coloured alloys I wouldn't bother hiding it.
 
I get the cloning bit if you are just posting it on facebook etc.
But when you are selling an old car, I don't get why people do it.
It is not worth worrying about that. When you sell it, it is not going to be your problem.

I always just think it is to stop you from looking up the history of the vehicle because you have something to hide.

Fair enough if it is something really expensive and you don't want people to come looking for it.
 
[TW]Fox said:
You don't need a reg to check insurance.
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I'd far prefer giving the insurance Co the correct reg so they got the exact info for the car.
Some seem absolutely useless on locating correct engine/spec/trim.

Even more so that now some insurance Co's are apparently expecting factory fitted extra's to be declared as additions.
We all know they'll do anything they can to squirm out of a claim and I'd rather give them as little opportunity as possible

And also valid point raised above, with the reg you can check the with the MOT history too.
I've encountered a couple of people when when I've asked if advisories were adressed they've pretty much said they weren't aware of any advisories lol

Think the best one was somethign along the lines of significantly deteriorated :p
 
I wouldn't hide the number plate on a car, however with the potential theft aspect in mind I would ensure that the location data was removed from the picture. It's a cherished plate, would that make it more or less likely for cloning?
 
While cloning is the primary concern, it's presumably easiest to trawl through motors/auto-trader to find the same car model/colour and grab the plate from there - so even showing the reg when selling isn't ideal.

something I just thought about - Aren't there now a couple "rate my driving" style websites, where mumsnet users can rant about someone that overtook them? I'm pretty sure I've already seen it in 1 owner's group, about someone using the on-show registration to post about another forum member's bad driving (to screen-grab and mock). How long before insurance companies/someone starts aggregating that information about the car's registration and trying to profile the driver, to get a more "accurate" insurance quote?
 
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