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Blanking out Reg Number

I try not to give away too many details online.
I was recently searching Autotrader for a car. I found one that was of interest at a good price, lots of nice photos some showing the sellers house, with house name, personal number plate (woman’s name). From that info and a bit of Googling I was able to find the exact address, the name of the seller and that he and his wife were directors of a business that was going into administration and of course given those details it’s easy to search Facebook etc.
 
Your number plate is obviously in the public domain but in the UK, the personal details attached to the reg number are only accessible to certain elements of society such as the DVLA, Insurers, Garages, Retailers, Finance companies etc. Not to mention data leaks and hacking.

There are criminal elements in many lines of work and by posting your number plate online you could be making it easier for those individuals to find your vehicle on a database, ‘reverse lookup’ style. They could probably find what they want anyway but this makes it easier.

For example, someone is looking for a nearly new green Cali they can surf the web, look up your number plate in a dealer / MOT / Insurance or other database which may also have been stolen or leaked. They can then come and take the vehicle from outside your home, or just clone it or your data for other purposes etc.

I’m not commenting from some ‘moral high ground’ - I’ve hidden my reg on some posts but not on others over the years and I can see why some people hide their reg numbers and why others don’t bother.

I had a car stolen from outside my apartment some years back. Turned out that a young lad in an MOT garage was cloning keys of certain vehicles and passing them, with the relevant address etc, to others who would then steal them. I guess my point here is that, whilst data is hidden from most, not all those with access to databases are honest....

Anyway, let’s not get paranoid or we’d never leave the house.... oh wait.... .can we leave the house now??




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