I now know I am OFFICIALLY on some sort of watchlist! Yippee!
The list is supposedly not exhaustive, but I recommend everyone to search your plate to see if you’ve been tracked. I worry for the safety of the women who have been searched more than 50 times by the same user.
If you think the government is the only organization using your data against you friend, you’re living in a different era. Insurance companies, banks, ad farms, private security, AI tech giants, etc., etc., ad nauseum are all using your public and private profile to shape every second of every day. Testing your limits, tracking your movements, mapping your relationships, your buying patterns, and making you dance like a puppet for their entertainment.
The government is the least scary of the groups shaping your world, because at least there’s hypothetically an accountability mechanism in the democratic process. Public, private, it really makes little difference, if you trust any of them without question, you’re playing yourself
What’s the business case here for this example?
The obvious example is how Facebook tracks your physical location and nearby devices to determine what ads to serve you. That’s often why people think Facebook is listening to them and serving them ads for things they mentioned in casual conversation but haven’t searched for themselves. They didn’t search for it, but their friend did, and they know if you get an ad for that thing you’re more likely to click through based on potential word-of-mouth effects. They’re using your IRL social network and physical location as an extension of their ad algorithm.
I’m skeptical, but to play devil’s advocate: I guess it could help a data broker that had some information attached to a license plate number, perhaps including your identity. When you enter your license plate number into this web search, they can associate the IP address and browser fingerprint of the request with the license plate and therefore with your identity and any other data in the first database. This enables them to connect your identity and your vehicle to whatever online activity data they have for that IP address and/or browser fingerprint.