Would you pay $700, plus a monthly fee, for a digital license plate?

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FOSTER CITY, Calif.—It's been a few weeks now since a Bay Area startup put a digital license plate on my car.

So far, nobody seems to have noticed. I haven't yet been pulled aside by police or civilians asking what it is. At first glance, this electronic device looks exactly like a traditional, stamped metal license plate. The new digital plate has the same scripted CALIFORNIA icon up top and uses the exact same size and font to show the numbers and letters.

But in actuality, what I have is an "Rplate," a $700 plate-sized Kindle-like screen on the back of my car—high-contrast grayscale e-ink and all.

The device also contains an RFID and GPS chip that allow me to see where my car is at any given moment, to voluntarily track my trips (think an Uber or Lyft-style ride map), and to even optionally display DMV-approved customized messages in a small font below the plate number itself. (Mine currently says "Watch for Cyclists," although during the NBA Finals, I had "LET'S GO WARRIORS!")

Were I an actual paying customer, I'd be paying $7 per month in a service fee, too, mostly to offset the data connection to Verizon. The one-time $700 price tag alone is a bit high for me. (If you think I should be paid more, feel free to email my boss.)

To be clear, I have a loaner model, and by the time this story comes out, I'll soon be sending the plate back to the company, Reviver. The model I've been using is one of the first 1,000 such plates that are legally out on California roads right now.

More are coming, according to Reviver CEO Neville Boston, who told me at his office recently that in addition to being legal (and commercially available) in the Golden State, the plate is likely coming soon to Arizona, Texas, Florida, and Washington state at their state agencies' discretion. Reviver is pushing other states, including Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, Colorado, and New Mexico, to follow suit in the coming months.

Still, after my experience of a few weeks, there's no clear and compelling case to be made as to why most of us non-rich individuals need this fancy plate. Also, there are still unanswered questions about its security and what it means to voluntarily hand over so much personal location data to a single company.

But why?
Why would someone pay so much when conventional plates work well and don't cost nearly as much? In part, to mitigate theft. In a sense, the Rplate is a modern-day LoJack, which still makes a radio-based recovery system that dates back to the 1980s. But the Rplate does more than simply emit a homing beacon. The goal of the plate is mostly to enhance convenience. Imagine a near-future where you can update your registration and pay for tolls and parking all through a unified platform via a single smartphone app connected to your plate (a "platform that enables you to do everything in one place," said Boston). Plus, what if you could put silly images on your plate (or maybe sell ads) while your car sits idle in a parking lot?

At least for now, you can't display whatever message you like. Reviver only allows the Rplate to display messages that have been pre-approved by the DMV.
Boston not only wants the Rplate to help its own drivers; he also wants it to transmit important data to other drivers, like Amber alerts, Silver alerts, weather alerts, and so on. Plus, he said, it would be an "always-on Waze." And speaking of the DMV, the plate could also potentially be a way for a DMV to monitor future road usage.

What if you paid road taxes per mile driven?
Sitting in a conference room in this mid-Peninsula town just up the road from the heart of Silicon Valley, CEO Neville Boston explained that, while the Rplate is very new on California roads, it's been in the works for about a decade.

He said that the origins of the company go back to 2008 during the global financial crisis. That's when Boston began having a conversation with a friend who worked in the California state government.

"We were talking about resources that the state was underutilizing," he recalled. Boston learned that, because the gas tax intended to pay for transportation infrastructure had not gone up in a decade, "then the value of those dollars [is] precipitously going down," as he explained to Ars.

The California Legislative Analyst's Office had come to the same conclusion just a year before, noting, "The current state gas tax rate (18 cents per gallon) has been in place since 1994. Since then, inflation has eroded the value of per-gallon gas tax revenues by 29 percent, so that 18 cents is worth less than 13 cents today (in constant dollar terms)."

(If we skip ahead in time to 2017, we see Gov. Jerry Brown sign into law a new gas tax that raised the state's cut by $0.12 per gallon. Electric car owners aren't exempt, either: starting in 2020, they'll have to pay an annual fee of $100.)

Boston felt that there had to be a better way to essentially charge heavy users of roads more. Reviver—then called Smart Plate Mobile—was founded in 2009, soon after this conversation with his government friend.

"You should be charged based on how you use the roads," Boston said. "Our platform supports the ability to do that... What I'm about is working to solve real problems with technology."

The company's first prototype, a heavy, bulky item, was built in 2009. Beyond getting the hardware right, the company had to make sure that the plate was legal in its home state.

In 2013, Boston and his cofounder at Smart Plate Mobile, Mike C. Jordan, successfully lobbied Sacramento to pass Senate Bill 806, which allowed for a "pilot program... to evaluate the use of alternatives to stickers, tabs, license plates, and registration cards." Smart Plate Mobile changed its name to Reviver later that year, and its patent was issued in 2015 (similar patents have been issued to many others in recent decades for similar electronic license plates). A 2016 law, SB 1399, extended this pilot program deadline to January 1, 2019, with a report due to the legislature due by July 1, 2020.

As Ars reported back in 2013, the bill raised some eyebrows among privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

What about privacy?
Having covered the early stages of this company (and being weirdly obsessed with license plate reader (LPR) technology), I am all too aware of the ease with which law enforcement can obtain our location information. In a sense, a digital license plate could make LPRs obsolete.

If Reviver's digital plates become commonplace and most of its customers choose to opt in to volunteering their vehicle's location (it's not on by default), police will certainly be able to present a court order to Reviver to obtain a customer's location information without a warrant.

After all, under the legal notion known as the third-party doctrine, if a person voluntarily gives up information (location data) to a third-party (Reviver), it's relatively easy for the government to get it. Even in the wake of the recent Carpenter decision at the Supreme Court, where a majority of the court found that cell-site location information was specifically intimate, private, and needed the protections of a warrant, the third-party doctrine largely remains.

Under the company's privacy policy, Reviver has committed to disclosing customers' information "to third parties in order to comply with a legal obligation (including but not limited to subpoenas and warrants); if we otherwise believe, in good faith, that such disclosure is required under applicable laws," among other situations.

In addition, the company's privacy policy says that its digital plate platform may be used "to send you promotional material or special offers on our behalf or on behalf of our marketing partners." But that service isn't available just yet.

"We do not have plans for this right now," Bobby Penn, a vice president of marketing, told Ars. "However, we wanted to be covered in case, in the future, we can offer something around this as a value for our customer."

He further explained that "vehicle trip data" is saved on company servers for a year but that customers can request data to be deleted any time. Under normal circumstances, however, both through the company app and through its Web interface, only the last two weeks of data can be accessed. Penn added that Reviver "does have access to [the full year] through our back-end systems; however, we have policies in place on who can access and for legitimate reasons."

However, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California still has many questions about how these potentially invasive devices will be used in practice.

"Digital license plates are arriving at the same time that ICE is trying to locate and target immigrants by exploiting police license plate reader databases," Matt Cagle, an ACLU attorney, told Ars. "California's immigrant drivers deserve to know that signing up for a digital license plate won't open them up to additional risk."

Similarly, Lee Tien, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that there remain "a lot of issues" and unanswered questions that have been pending since 2013.

"We did not approve of the product—our understanding was that it was just a pilot—but we did not fight the pilot (as I said, we didn't see a way to stop it) and got a few privacy protections in," he wrote.

Plus, as Tien has pointed out, it's unclear how good the security on the actual plate itself is—we don't know what level of scrutiny Reviver has subjected its own systems to.

The CEO told me that "an independent security company performs audits and continually evaluates our systems," but he declined to make this audit available to Ars, citing "security reasons." He also would not allow us to open up the plate and subject it to our own hardware tests.

Boston did say, however, that the Rplate itself "features a secured and encrypted data connection to the cloud with AES 256-bit symmetric key encryption and secure HTTP access using TLS."

Still, the executive stresses that this product and its related services are voluntary—no one is being compelled to have a digital license plate. Indeed, it's easy imagine a world in which citizens voluntarily transmit their cars' location to police directly as a way to thwart theft.

"I have long said that the next step from Community Oriented Policing will be 'Collaborative Policing' in which citizens actively work with law enforcement," Cmdr. Sid Heal (Ret.), formerly of the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department, told Ars.

"This is the postmodern equivalent of the 'hue and cry' method of the Middle Ages. We are already starting to see it with citizens finding their own stolen property on eBay and Craigslist, not to mention photographing and videoing crooks in action. I also suggested creating a database where citizens could run property on their cell phones to find if it was listed as stolen with the name of the detective, department, and report number."

Heal, who is currently the president of the California Association of Tactical Officers, was encouraged to see the advent of such technology, noting that it could provide "a silent alert that [a driver is] in need of assistance" or could flash "alerts for vehicles with outstanding warrants," among many other ideas.

"That said, I would personally use it just to say 'thanks' to the guy or gal who let me change lanes or slowed down to let me move over," he emailed.

The future
For now, Reviver seems to be betting that corporate and municipal vehicle fleets will buy Rplates, albeit at a notable discount. The City of Sacramento, for example, recently installed 24 on its electric vehicle fleet, with an intention to install 11 more.

Boston wants Reviver to sell a flagship hardware product where additional services could be added, like tolling, parking, and more.

"I look at our product more like Apple, ours is building a compelling product that people want to buy and not selling or using people's data," he said. "I'm looking at an ecosystem play; it's offering you value in a unique way. It's [Apple's] ecosystem that makes them so powerful because everything is connected. There's value in the hardware. What's really valuable long term and getting us connected is in our platform. It's a unique value proposition."

Clearly, it's still early days. But I'll admit, Rplates do seem like the inevitable future.