Pawel, excuse my ignorance. Can you educate me on the reason for blanking out the license plate number in the picture in your Post #20 above.
Ralph, I find this to be an interesting question. In the USA, at least, unless you are law enforcement, or some type of other government agent on a mission, so to speak, linking a genuine plate number to a name, address and owner is not legally possible.
Now, I'll reserve the judgment that there may be "Private Investigative" agencies or services, that for a fee, would provide that information...how I do not know. And, exactly what would they do with it?
Some years back, when I was putting together the Pagoda Style book, one of the contributors (who shall remain nameless!!) was "all kinds of worried" about this exact thing. So, not only did I spend an enormous amount of time carefully airbrushing out the number plate (to make it look like it was NOT airbrushed out...I actually REMOVED it
) but then he decided "no, leave it alone". Arghhh...
Then, another nameless contributor was seemingly paranoid, for lack of a better term, that the mere general location of his car mentioned would lead to its theft. So, the contributor's actual location was disguised.
Now, let's get real everyone. It takes a thief quite literally 90 seconds to remove a catalytic converter from ANY car parked on the street. It takes them two minutes to remove an airbag, and there are READY MARKETS for these stolen items. They fetch very, very good money, they are easy to steal and it doesn't matter if it's a 10 year old Toyota or a brand new BMW. Cast alloy wheels on Fords--and there are literally tens of thousands of them just in a 50 mile radius of where I am--are also incredibly easy to steal, and blocking a car and removing all four is done with the speed of a NASCAR wheel change.
So tell me now--what kind of thief is somehow going to go out of his way to track down your old car? Or, track you down because he saw your number plate?
While I don't leave my car running on the street, and I avoid most bad neighborhoods and park it in a garage (well, sometimes its in a museum), I don't go through elaborate means to hide or disguise my car, nor my ownership of it. Just saying...