Ticket less tracking can sometimes be helpful. I was once in an outside carpark where an (over enthusiastic…) ranger booked my car for overstaying the allotted time. I was furious because I knew I hadn’t and luckily I located the ranger before leaving. I spelled out to him that having recently just left the camera monitored library car park during the alleged time breach it was impossible for my car to have been in this spot at the same time. This was obviously a quota or money raising scam and I made sure to get his details and to put in a complaint to council. Surprise, surprise the rangers worked for an independent firm but council did look into it and the rangers were not seen again.
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The only way they can match your parking habits to your shopping habits is if you set up a parking account with the shopping centre so that they know who you are. Otherwise, supposedly, it isn’t possible for private individuals or organisations to find out who the owner of a particular vehicle is.
To overcome your paranoia you have two choices. You can simply pay cash each time you leave the centre. Alternatively you can set up a parking account using a fake name. You’d need to disable the automatic top-up feature so that you don’t quote your credit card details, as that would disclose your name to the shopping centre.
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Toll Road operators can obtain car owner details even if they only have plate numbers, this can also apply to parking fee offences as far as I know. I’m not sure of what process they need to undertake but the bill and letters of demand do flow from this ability.
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In Queensland this used to be the case…any offense involving a vehicle (fly tipping, illegal access, parking etc and offenses under responsibility of police) Any access to the system is only for approved persons, access is recorded and audited and one must justify access to information if requested. I recall some cases many years ago where access was unauthorised (for personal reasons, to help someone else track down the information, to seek payment for info) and action was taken against the offenders. I expect it is still the same.
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Some years ago, anyone could apply to TMR Qld for the owner details of any vehicle and, of course, pay the fee…
There was a turnarouind of some days so as to help prevent road rage idiots confronting vehicle owners.
There are restrictions for online searches but I cannot find anything regarding the over the counter applications.
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A comment in this conversation asked, basically, what can you do about ‘big brother’? Everyone seems to have given up protecting their privacy. Younger people who have never known the joy of not being tracked, simply don’t care and just accept it as part of the digital world.
Governments and businesses rub their hands in glee at the apathy of the majority of the population who have freely given their entire private lives, for free to be used in one way or another. I’m not sure how this will all end, but go back my point about the joy I remember in another world without spy cameras, digital everything and being able to pay for stuff when the lights went out.
Regards
Ray
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Human nature. We are not solitary beings. We are group - herd - adapted.
The jungle or fens?
Historically shared communities, shelter and extended relationships are in our evolutionary DNA. There are few secrets and little privacy in such places. Sharing and cooperation was/is a survival skill. Take the community away and we mostly fail. Ask anyone who has lived that experience first hand.
Can we blame organisation and opportunity on the day for hollowly fulfilling what we are missing in today’s more isolated (independence is fake) lifestyles?
We may be asking too much of privacy for all the wrong reasons. Somethings should never be private?
The difference is in numbers. A tribe might have tens or hundreds of members, with the occasional tribe extending into the low thousands. You know everyone, and have certain society-imposed norms for behaviour.
Even up to the 19th and early 20th centuries, if a local community learned that a man was beating his wife unnecessarily or too viciously (of course, beating by itself was reasonable in those days) that man was in for a thrashing of his own. Local enforcement of locally agreed norms and standards of behaviour.
The beat cop is long gone; few of us would recognise the police in our neighbourhoods. With that community splintering, and in part moving online, we have not only gained new contacts and contexts but have lost some basics in the way a physical community once operated. I know my neighbours largely by saying hello when we are piling into or out of our respective vehicles. Beyond them, I have relationships with some of the people who work at our local shopping centre. I have other relationships with work colleagues (most of whom I have not seen in six months).
Apart from these tenuous, context-driven and transactional relationships I have family and maybe a few friends. Most people have more ‘physical’ friends than me, because I am a bit of an outlier in the ‘sociability’ stakes, but my point is that while human nature takes us so far we have gone beyond what is natural by evolutionary standards. Humans have not evolved to live in cities of hundreds of thousands or millions of people; nor have we evolved to be part of a global community.
We communicate internationally at the speed of thought. Hundreds of millions of people and ideas are laid out before us, allowing the individual to choose their own community and niche without ever seeing another person. Some of us choose to share our inner-most thoughts and feelings with those strangers online, but some of us also wish to have a private space where we can be unrecognised and can say what we really think without fear that it will be repackaged and sold to an advertiser, or discovered by a potential employer, or used against us by our own and/or other governments.
Privacy in a global community has not been adequately defined or enforced. I suspect that it is too late, but we can still hope to hold onto the little privacy that remains to us - whether from companies like Google or from car park owners.
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I am confused! This has been standard practice in Sydney shopping centre carparks for a number of years.
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We’ve never had it, except for obscurity - privacy has, in my view, always been by luck/etc and the acceleration of that running out ramped up decades ago, just most didn’t realise it …
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I assume your concern about your privacy in car parks means you do not have: any credit cards, a mobile smartphone, you have never contributed to an on-line forum, have never bought anything on-line, have never used a search engine to find information on the internet, do not have subscription TV, do not have any social media accounts, do not have any shop loyalty cards, do not belong to any airline loyalty cards (Qantas, flybuys, Virgin, etc), have never been inside a bank, post office or any other financial institution, have never withdrawn money from an ATM, have not been inside a supermarket in the last 20 years, have not ventured past your front door for decades, have not travelled on public transport (with or without a travel card) or… well you get the point. Even car parks with the old ticketing system have CCTV and these days ae unlikely to accept cash payments!
The truth is, nothing is private anymore. Everyone has a camera and a recording device in their pocket. We are tracked literally from cradle to grave. And mostly it has happened by stealth. Even during COVID, the push to become a cashless society means the surrender of even more privacy. It really is a question of be careful what you wish for.
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Further on car parks and the pros and cons of digital dealing - I recently got a phone call just as I arrived back at my car, which caused me to drop my ticket. I didn’t realise till I got down the ramps to ground level. I was able to pull over, and return to my space, and found my ticket, eureka!
This was a Sunday, a free parking day, so no attendant in the ticket box - but still the ticket is required to open the boom gate. Only the security company’s phone number is provided.
I returned a few weeks later to ask the attendant what one is supposed to do, if you really have lost the ticket - he could only suggest using an intercom - apparently at the exit boom - to communicate with another Hobart council car park. He did agree that a phone number prominently displayed would be a good idea, and promised to suggest it.
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I had that situation at the local airport car park - on the intercom a person who seemed disinterested in my situation - having paid and the boom gate wouldn’t go up. Me in a large ‘meat-axe’ 4x4 with a steel bull bar - them with a flimsy boom gate. Three or more cars behind me. I just stated the obvious and said ‘your call’ - in a few seconds I will be going home. Boom gate had no trouble at that point.
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At the car park of a busy shopping centre, with LPR system, lunch time on a Saturday, the boom gate wouldn’t lift.
I used the intercom for assistance and was told to “Go back”. I looked back and saw a long line of cars and not an inch of space to spare, but before I could reply, out comes a man from the car behind mine and starts yelling into the intercom to: “ Let this Lady out NOW!
You’re wasting time and money, DO IT NOW.
Just DO IT!”
Of course nothing happened, and he went back into his car.
Timidly, having visions of being escorted out by security, I whispered into the intercom “Sorry, I don’t know that man, he’s in the car behind mine and getting upset about the wait.”
The Boom gate lifted!
I couldn’t get out of that car park fast enough!
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You forgot to name and shame the centre.
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South Melbourne Central.
Except for that one time, an excellent shopping centre 
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Hahaha, maybe he learnt something about impatient drivers!
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The name on the card isn’t disclosed to the merchant afaik.
Well there are many that are signed and warn you they’re using Automatic Number Recognition but how many of them are actually bluff though to scare you into obeying the rules?
I can tell that the LPR system is working when it can track my vehicle’s free parking period? 
Sorry I forgot to mention that the car parks I’m talking about don’t have boom gates but just 2 hour limited parking sign and it’s usually the smaller ones at convenience store and medical centre car parks.
