Earlier in this series I wrote about Flock cameras — the automated license-plate readers now blanketing Minnesota's roads and suburbs, photographing every plate that passes, logging where and when, and feeding databases that get searched millions of times and, increasingly, sold and shared. Here's a follow-up that started as a piece of practical lawyer's advice and turned into an argument about fairness.
Because there is a way to fight back against plate surveillance. It's just that, as things stand, only the well-off get to use it.
The trick
A license-plate reader captures one thing: your plate number and where it was. That's not very useful on its own. It becomes surveillance the moment it's connected to you — your name, your home address — and that connection is made by looking the plate up against the state's vehicle-registration records. Those records tie a plate to its registered owner.
So here's the move the sophisticated already know: don't register the car in your own name. Title it to a revocable living trust, or to an LLC. Then when someone runs the plate, the registration comes back to "The 1247 Oak Street Trust" or "North Star Holdings LLC" — not to you. The camera still sees the car; it just can't easily connect the car to a human being. Celebrities do this. Wealthy people do this routinely, for their cars and their houses both. It's completely legal, and it works.
Under federal and Minnesota law, vehicle-registration data is governed by the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, and Minnesota expressly treats registration data that way (Minn. Stat. § 168.346 ties it to 18 U.S.C. § 2721). But that law is riddled with exceptions — it lets the data flow to law enforcement, to insurers, to "authorized recipients" in bulk, and more. The practical privacy you get from the DPPA is thin. The practical privacy you get from simply not having your name on the registration in the first place is real. If the plate resolves to a trust, there's no personal name in the record to disclose.
And there's the problem
Read that again and the injustice jumps out. The defense against mass surveillance exists — but it costs money. Setting up a trust or an LLC means paying a lawyer to draft it, paying filing and registration fees, sometimes paying an annual renewal, and dealing with the paperwork of titling and insuring a vehicle through an entity. For a family that has a lawyer on retainer, that's a Tuesday. For the single mom working two jobs, the retiree on a fixed income, the young worker with a used car and no savings, it's out of reach — not because the technique is complicated, but because it costs money they don't have.
So we've arrived at a two-tier system of privacy. The cameras watch everyone equally — the surveillance is perfectly democratic. But the shield against it is a luxury good, available to whoever can afford the legal setup. The affluent buy their way out of being tracked; everyone else is tracked. That is exactly backwards from how rights are supposed to work. We don't let people buy their way out of unreasonable searches, or purchase a better version of the right to remain silent. Privacy shouldn't be a premium subscription for people with a lawyer.
I'll be honest that the trust trick isn't perfect even for those who use it — a determined investigator with a warrant can pierce it, and it doesn't stop the camera from photographing the car. But it meaningfully breaks the automatic, bulk, warrantless connection between your movements and your name, which is precisely the thing that makes mass plate-reading so powerful. That partial protection being sold only to the wealthy is the whole point.
The real fix isn't a trust — it's regulating the surveillance
If the only way to have vehicle privacy is to incorporate, we've already lost the plot. The answer to "the rich can shield themselves and the poor can't" is not "teach everyone to set up an LLC." It's to make the shield unnecessary by governing the surveillance itself — so that ordinary people get, by right and for free, the protection the wealthy now buy.
That means the reforms I laid out in the Flock piece, aimed at the tracking rather than at your registration paperwork:
- Require a warrant to search plate-reader databases for a specific person's movements, so the government can't rummage through where everyone has been without cause.
- Cap retention — delete the location records of people who aren't suspected of anything, fast, so there's no years-deep map of your life sitting in a database.
- Ban the sale and sharing of plate-location data to brokers and outside agencies, the pipeline that turns a local traffic camera into a national surveillance product.
Do that, and the trust trick becomes a curiosity instead of a necessity — because everyone, regardless of what they can pay a lawyer, gets the same protection.
What we can do
Regulate the cameras, don't privatize the escape hatch. The goal is universal privacy by law, not a market in privacy for those who can afford entities. Warrant requirements, retention limits, and a ban on data sales deliver to everyone what the trust delivers to the few.
Meanwhile, make the low-cost tools known. Until the law catches up, people deserve to know their options — including that Minnesota lets you title a vehicle to a trust, and that low-cost and legal-aid resources exist. Privacy knowledge shouldn't be a secret handshake either.
Name the principle. A right you have to be rich to exercise isn't a right; it's a privilege. Surveillance that everyone is subject to but only the wealthy can escape is the definition of a two-tier system, and Minnesota should reject it.
You shouldn't need a trust and a lawyer to keep a network of cameras from mapping everywhere you drive. The fact that, right now, you basically do is the clearest argument there is for fixing the surveillance instead of selling the escape.
First the facts. Then the fix.
Sources
Minn. Stat. § 168.346 (Privacy of Personal Information — vehicle registration data), verified against raw text at revisor.mn.gov: registration data on an individual "shall be treated as provided by United States Code, title 18, section 2721" (the federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act) and "disclosed as required or permitted by that section," including bulk disclosure to authorized recipients for the statute's permissible uses, and dealer and public-safety access provisions (subd. 1–2). The federal Driver's Privacy Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 2721 et seq., restricts disclosure of motor-vehicle records but contains broad permissible-use exceptions (including law enforcement, insurance, and licensed-investigator uses) and bulk-disclosure provisions. The classification of Department of Public Safety data appears at Minn. Stat. § 13.69. The lawfulness of titling a Minnesota vehicle to a revocable trust or an LLC follows from ordinary Minnesota vehicle-titling and entity law. Cross-reference to this series' article on Flock/automated license-plate-reader surveillance and the Minnesota Government Data Practices Act (§ 13.824), and its proposed warrant, retention-limit, and data-sale-ban reforms.
This article is general commentary, not individualized legal, tax, or estate-planning advice; titling a vehicle to a trust or LLC has insurance, lending, tax, and liability consequences a reader should weigh with their own advisor, and it does not defeat a lawful warrant. The precise scope and exceptions of the DPPA are summarized rather than quoted in full. Corrections: campaign@madgettformn.com.