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I disagree with the tacit assumption here, which is that a license plate is private information.

Driving a car on a public road is a public, social act, which requires licensing and abiding by numerous rules.

A license plate is a token of registration in a public database, required to be displayed. Registration is required because people can cause enormous harm with a vehicle directly, and also use a vehicle for fleeing from the scene of a crime. Not to mention that vehicles can be stolen.

If license plates are private information, then I'm violating privacy by writing down the license plate of a vehicle that is fleeing from a hit-and-run.

Bull. Fucking. Shit.

If you want a vehicle that lets you go wherever you want and do whatever you want without being identified by your vehicle, use a scooter or bicycle or any other unregistered, unlicensed form of transportation.

If you can't get me to care about this "privacy" issue, your narrative is screwed, because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

I'll summarize your argument: You don't have privacy in public.

I agree.

When you write down a license plate number you're not surveilling the owner of the car. The privacy being talked about here is being lost in the crowd—you're not protected from someone looking for your license plate but you are protected against some corporation or the authorities knowing everywhere you go in real time with perfect accuracy and recall.

> If you can't get me to care about this "privacy" issue, your narrative is screwed, because I'm in a vehemently pro-freedom libertarian demographic.

your assertion of credentials is thoroughly countered by the information which is shared in your profile.

You can't just say that anything you don't personally like equals harm.

I get the feeling you’re saying this because the harm caused by privacy loss is complicated, uncertain, time offset, etc, while “harm” feels to you like losing $100 or getting punched. You should think about the 1960s civil rights movement. Imagine you’re in the midst of it, without the hindsight of settled history, with actually many authority figures telling all these silly “activists” to get a real job and stop making such a fuss about something we all got on fine without until they started on their tantrum. What thought process would you need in order to correctly analyze whether the things being fought against were genuinely harms? What is the result of applying that thought process to privacy?

This is, by the way, playing catch-up, privacy has been an internationally recognized human right for many years. I’m just trying to help you see human rights from a perspective other than “something somebody is ordering me to care about”.

There's more words than just the headline. You don't have to agree with them, but they're there.

If you understood my comment you would understand that I don't agree with them. If you are trying to passively aggressively call me out for not reading reading article (of which I did), do so directly.

What is there to understand about it? You don't make an argument, just a shallow dismissal. There's nothing about your comment that indicates you read TFA.

You could engage with the article and explain why you don't agree with the argument that is being made - or you could simply leave no comment at all. That is the hidden subtext of the comment you are replying to here.

The article made a case. You didn't refute it or make your own, you just said "nuh uh".

Don't they state pretty clearly the actual harm that is occurring due to undermined privacy?

They make up their own definitive of harm that includes that. The article is about how the definition of harm the law uses, doesn't match how they would like to see it defined.

You do not understand how the law works, and you are making a fool of yourself.

They are in the middle of asking a court to clarify what the law means by the word "harm". That is not settled as yet. Things like that get settled by litigation. They are taking a position in such litigation.

We've lost a great deal of nuance in our discourse by taking our previous richly varied and gradated universe of wrongnesses and projecting them all onto the "safety/harm/consent" axis.

It's as if we're no longer capable of conceiving of something that is bad independent of that thing causing harm. Consequently, in order to express sophisticated moral concepts in our guttural pidgin of a moral vocabulary, we need to use combinations of words that are facial absurdities, like "privacy harm is harm".

You could switch the analogy and just harm people that remove your privacy. I'm much more fond of that route.