The seven-character pattern California has used for 45 years will finally run out of combinations in 2025, two years earlier than expected. But America's largest car market has a plan.
Just changing to a new numbering system when they run out.
strong privacy laws regarding how that data can be used
In practice this just isn’t going to work, because the whole infrastructure is aligned against effective privacy such that you can’t just pass a simple law to ensure it. What I’ve heard from someone working in local government is that right now there is an overwhelming push to move all computer systems to the cloud (private company servers and software), and most of them are there already, which means that the actual people, practices, and physical hardware managing data are at multiple levels of remove from democratic scrutiny and influence. Also consider the high profile recent events regarding collection and misuse of existing data by the US federal government regardless of laws prohibiting it. None of the information collected and stored by the government (or corporations for that matter) is safe, and the task of making it safe becomes more impractical all the time.
Of course these are also problems that would be good to address, but I think you can’t count on them being resolved because they probably will not be. Which isn’t to say good laws on what data isn’t safe to be collected to begin with, or what decisions affecting people’s lives aren’t safe to be made by computers, are likely either, but that at least seems like a more realistic approach to me than trying to build a Panopticon that somehow doesn’t get abused.
In practice this just isn’t going to work, because the whole infrastructure is aligned against effective privacy such that you can’t just pass a simple law to ensure it. What I’ve heard from someone working in local government is that right now there is an overwhelming push to move all computer systems to the cloud (private company servers and software), and most of them are there already, which means that the actual people, practices, and physical hardware managing data are at multiple levels of remove from democratic scrutiny and influence. Also consider the high profile recent events regarding collection and misuse of existing data by the US federal government regardless of laws prohibiting it. None of the information collected and stored by the government (or corporations for that matter) is safe, and the task of making it safe becomes more impractical all the time.
Of course these are also problems that would be good to address, but I think you can’t count on them being resolved because they probably will not be. Which isn’t to say good laws on what data isn’t safe to be collected to begin with, or what decisions affecting people’s lives aren’t safe to be made by computers, are likely either, but that at least seems like a more realistic approach to me than trying to build a Panopticon that somehow doesn’t get abused.