Google And Facebook Are Reading Your License Plates

For years I’ve gone back and forth over the practice of obscuring license plates on photos on the internet. License plates are already publicly-viewable things, so what’s the point in obscuring them, right? Well, now I think there actually is a good reason to obscure your license plates in photos because it appears that Google is actually reading the plates in photos, and then making the actual license plate alphanumeric sequence searchable. I tested it. It works.

The way this works is to search for the license plate number using Google Images. That’s it.

In my testing, I started with my own cars that I know have had images of their license plates in Jalopnik articles. For my Nissan Pao, a search of my license plate number brings up an image of my car, from one of my articles, as the first result:

It’s worth noting that the image search results aren’t even trying to differentiate the search term as a license plate; the number sequence has just been tagged to the photo automatically after whatever hidden Google OCR system reads the license plate. This can mean that someone searching a similar sequence of characters could likely end up with a result for your car if enough of those characters match your license plate.

I tried again with the license number for the Yugo fellow Jalop Mike Ballaban gave me, and was greeted with an even more impressive display of results:

Woah, damn! Because this car has been photographed and written about a good bit, there’s a lot of results here, and my name and other Jalopnik employees’ names show up in those top links, too. Of course, I should mention that at no point did we tag the Yugo’s license plate number to any of these photos—that’s all behind-the-scenes Google black magic.

The license plate reader does not differentiate based on the national origin of plate—whatever that AI is doing, it seems to identify a car and a license plate, and then reads the characters and tags the image with them. Here’s a European plate used on a Mercedes press car:

I also was able to learn that Volkswagen must be re-using plates on their press vehicles, because the VW California camper I just tested had a plate with the number HCA 187:

…and that same plate shows up on a red camper from the previous year:

Since it treats all countries equally, sometimes you can use it to find a car’s foreign license plate-twin, as I did with this V8-swapped Karmann Ghia I spotted on the road, which has an unexpected Eastern Bloc license plate-twin:

I obscured those plates because the Ghia didn’t show up online. Yet.

Back to company-owned press vehicles, here’s the Jeep Gladiator I took on the Rubicon Trail, by license plate:

Now, many plates I searched for from other sources online didn’t come up, but many did. It’s safe to say that if there’s a photo of your car online and the license plate is visible, it will be read and tagged to the photo.

I don’t think there’s really all that much you can do about it. There are some ways you can maintain a bit more privacy, though, if you don’t want your cars, like mine, to pop up immediately when their license number is entered into a Google Image Search.

One way is to get an all-numeric license plate. Because numbers show up in so many contexts, an all-numeric plate search will likely be diluted by other results, making your car harder—if not impossible—to find.

Counterintuitively, the same goes for personalized license plates, too.

For example, I tried to search for this car’s plate, which was a personalized plate that used a normal, English word with a number replacing a letter. This alternate version of the word was common enough that a search was flooded with other, unrelated examples, making any possible images of this Viper very difficult to find.

Look, here’s a DKW from the Lane Museum, found via its license plate.

Anecdotal reports have suggested that Facebook and Instagram do this as well, and we may as well go ahead and accept this as true. If Google is doing it, there’s little reason to assume others aren’t.

The takeaway here is that you should just assume your license plate is known and tagged to pictures of your car. Even if you obscure your plate in every image you yourself post, there’s no way to know what images your car and its license plate may be in the background of, meaning if it’s not searchable yet, it likely will be.

I suppose the positive side is that if you see a hit and run or someone’s blocking you in, it’s a lot easier to find out who’s being the jerk. On the negative side, it’s just a reminder that privacy in so many ways is eroding away, and there’s damn little we can do about it.

Oh well. It’s not like I was being particularly sneaky in my Pao, anyway.