No, the license plates are not the problem. It's the scanning/recording of them that is.
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.
The idea of having titles for cars seems fundamentally weird too. We manage fine in most of the rest of the world without any special government paperwork establishing the owner of a vehicle.
Not necessarily, EU car registration usually provides information about who the car is registered to, not who owns it. These are two different things, of which only the first seems like something the government actually might need to know.
Given technology's march forward, it seems that higher resolution cameras would enable tracking systems to determine unique car identities by the pattern of imperfections in the vehicle, much like biologists sort leopards by their spots.
IOW, I think removing license plates just buys some time.
It does seem easier, but very low vlaue. If we let the recoding continue we will still have facial recognition, gait recognition, OnStar tracking, etc.
License plates provide basically the same info as the title to the car or your house. They only supply addition information, such as location when they are recorded somewhere. With things like facial recognition, you don't need the plates to track movement (although it is easier).
The real problem is public surveillance identifying/tracking individuals.