Well, I could make a case for obscuring my license plate in photos posted online because of the possibility of doxxing (or worse). This is a fairly benign forum as far as anger/death threats/general assholery, but not all forums are like that. I was on a Harley forum at one point in the past that was chock full of that sort of behavior. Again, most of it is just BS, but the problem with posting your opinion on line is that you really don't know much about the people who are reading it. Maybe you make a political statement at some point in your post that someone from the other side disagrees with enough to want to punish you for it. And lo and behold, that one day you posted a photo of your bike with your registration plate. That number reveals the name of the owner of the vehicle, and the location it's registered; with that info I could find out your name, your birthday, your wife's name, what property you own, and a whole raft of other info. There are numerous firms on line that'll sell you information on another person, and a registration number is a good start. When I was a private investigator, I could find out tons of information on you from a database like Lexis Nexis with just your plate number. If someone was interested in causing you some problems, you've just armed them with the tools to do it.
Is it likely? I doubt it. It probably didn't seem likely that Rebecca Schaffer would get murdered by a stalker who hired a Private Investigator to obtain her home address from the California DMV, but that's what happened. That's an absolute worst case scenario, but obscuring your plate with 5 minutes on Microsoft Paint before you post a pic of your ride on a forum, or Facebook, seems like a low effort way to ensure that someone you piss off on line because of your Second Amendment stance or that you prefer Kirk over Picard doesn't have the info to go full Fatal Attraction on you, or maybe call in a SWAT incident at your house, or call your employer to tell them you're a Furry.
I don't worry about the average person in public seeing my plate; they have no reason to get upset with me, because they aren't in a position to get inflamed over something I say that they disagree with. But I've been on something as stupid as a darkside thread where tempers really flared, and it's a lot worse on forums that have a "no holds barred" section that doesn't restrict inflammatory topics. There are a LOT of crazy people on line, and some of them are kinda dangerous, and you don't know which one you're dealing with when they respond to something you wrote.
