The Annoyed Man wrote:Blake, like you, I think that sometimes people's desire for personal security on the Internet can approach the paranoid..............
............BUT............
I do think there is a sort of minimum standard that makes sense. For instance, before I will post any closeup picture of one of my firearms, I'll make sure that the serial number is blurred out if it is otherwise visible in the picture. I don't post my address on public forums or Facebook, although because I am a business owner who works out of his home and my business has an Internet presence (I own a small website design and hosting business), a little due diligence on the part of a bad guy will eventually turn up my address. But, I'm not going to make it deliberately easy for someone with malicious intent.
I'm not so much worried about a home invasion while I am at home. Anyone with that career in mind who tracked me down via my Internet presence would have learned in the process that this would be one way to ensure getting shot down most ricky-tick. Between my wife and myself, they would be met with a mixture of 12 gauge, 5.56 NATO, .45 ACP, and 9mm. For me, I am less worried about what might happen to me and mine than I am worried about what might happen inside my home when I am NOT there to defend it. I don't have the largest or most varied gun collection on this forum, but I own a LOT more guns than the average bear. I keep them locked in a safe, and I have a pretty good home alarm system. I also have a largish (boxer/lab mix) dog who will eat your butt if you enter the house uninvited. But, none of those layers of security will stop a determined thief who knows that I am not there to defend the home, and the catastrophe of such an event isn't just the dollar loss in personal property to me--I have homeowner's insurance--or the loss of items to which I have an emotional attachment; it's that I would have armed a criminal with a wide variety of weapons that would make him a dangerous man indeed.
THAT is why I don't put up pictures of my license plate, or my gun serial numbers, on the Internet. You have a drop-dead gorgeous car. Yeah, it's "just a car", but think about what it would mean to you to open your garage one day and see an empty spot where you last parked your car. The problem with posting your license plate on the web isn't so much what someone might do to you, it's that anyone who cares to now knows where they can find a really nice Camaro for the taking. When I was still single and living back in California, my then girlfriend's father drove a very nice, and fairly rare Porsche with a racing pedegree. He kept it parked at night inside a locked garage with an alarm system on it. One morning, he came out to go to work, and found his garage door open, the alarm system bypassed, and the car gone..............and it had happened while they were all at home! They had not heard a thing. The thieves had backed a flat bed tow truck into the driveway, opened the garage, popped the locks on the Porsche doors, rolled it out of the garage and winched it up onto the tilted flat bed, all without making enough noise to wake up either my girlfriend's family OR their neighbors, whose house was right next to my girlfriend's driveway. The car was never seen again, by anybody. It was rare enough that it would have stood out if anyone had been driving it. No. The thieves almost certainly parted it out, and pieces from it were used to soup up other Porsche-owners' cars.
This event predates the Internet, taking place around 1980 or so, but somebody knew that there was a very nice Porsche to be taken at precisely her family's address--this was a planned theft and not a chance occurrence--and they used that information to abscond with the car. When you post your car with the license plate number clearly visible, you are advertising to potential thieves where they may find a really nice Camaro. Your car is very unique, and like you said, it really stands out. No thief with half a brain is going to try to sell your Camaro as an intact car to anyone but a chop shop. It will be torn apart, parted out, and never seen again. Thieves like that are not interested in confronting you or your family. This being Texas, they will probably even assume that you are armed, and they will understand that there is no percentage in threatening you or your loved ones. But unless that car is your daily driver (and I suspect that it is not), then they will simply wait until you and your wife are at work and your kids at school, and they'll rip you off while you're not there to stop them.
Also, with gun serial numbers in particular, the less the federal gummint knows about me or what I own, the happier I am. Unless things change, the day might easily come when we are "asked" (at the point of a gun) to surrender any firearms of a certain type....or of any type. I don't want to make things easier for them....but that's a separate discussion.
Anyway, the whole point of this isn't about what people might do to you, although that certainly has some small possibility, it is about what people might do to your stuff, which has a much higher probability. In my mind, listing a half dozen other YouTube videos of Camaros with license plates visible isn't proof that theft won't happen; it is proof that there are at least a half dozen other people out there who do not take the security of their property very seriously.
I'm not saying that you don't take it seriously, what I'm saying is that you can always do better at it. We all can. I hope you read this in the spirit intended..........just friendly advice.
Thanks for the friendly advice, but I'm still going to do things my way. I don't think the threat is great enough to go that extra mile. If I do hit the lottery and someone (From over the internet or locally) steals my car, or otherwise, well that's why I have good insurance.
Also, my car isn't in a garage, but out in the open for all to see. The car IS my daily my driver, and I'm not married no do I have kids. It is a unique car, but it's not THAT unique. At the end of the day, it's still just a 37 year old Camaro that's worth less than 10K.
Sorry my level of protection for my property seems to bother you so much. When it gets stolen and the insurance company doesn't compensate me, then I will reevaluate things. Until then I'm going to be young and stupid and pretend I know it all. Please do not be offended.
