Profiles

OK - I'm finally getting back to tackle another issue that's related to safety - Profiles. "Aren't they a way for someone to find out personal about me from my license plate?"

Nope - Nyet - Non - Nein - Ain't gonna happen....

Let's go back to the basic setup. When you join you create a username and a profile. You put as much or as little info in the profile as you want but none of it can be personal info like phone numbers or addresses. You can even go one step further and specify which of this data is visible to other PL8SCAN users. (The non-visible data is used by PL8SCAN to help us improve the service and tailor it to our users).

So now let's pretend Joe the nerd (sorry Joes) wants to "check out" somebody by their license plate. How would he do it at PL8SCAN? (Remember - PL8SCAN.com does NOT have access to any government records nor do we ask anyone to tell us what license plate they own - we just don't have that info.) Rather than explain how about this - My license plate is "Arizona PL8SCAN" and I obviously have a username and profile. I encourage you to contact me and let me know what information you were able to find out about me from PL8SCAN.

Just to clarify - we created the profile feature to help people sort through messages that might get Posted to their plate. For example - let's say you Scan your plate or get an email notice of a Post to it. Before you reply you decide to take a quick look at the profile of the username that Posted it and it says it's a 43 year old guy that lives in a zip code 1,000 miles from you. It's up to you but depending on the message I might guess he got the license plate wrong and choose not to reply to that one. And by the way - even if you did reply it's all within the PL8SCAN system and unless you tell someone your email address on purpose they're not going to find out from your message. And just in case this person decides to start sending you messages you don't want we make it simple to block those messages.

But now I'm getting into PL8Boxes and I'll save that for another time. Hope I helped here folks. Until next time...

Talking about safety

OK - so I lied - I said I was going to talk about Profiles and PL8Boxes on my next post. I decided to talk about safety instead. At our discussion group a concern was expressed that PL8SCAN could enable someone to find out personal information about someone else (your daughter / girlfriend etc). I answered that question and it seems to me that it covers it pretty well so I'll just repeat it here.

There's really no way to "check out" somebody. If you Scan a license
plate all you can find is other messages to it. When you Post a message
you're not given any information about who owns that plate. In fact
PL8SCAN doesn't even have that information.

Text message Posts comes to PL8SCAN and we in turn send a notice to
anyone who has requested notices for that plate. The notice we send out
includes the originators username but not their cell phone number. The
same is true if you reply to that notice.

Finally - you can look for a members' profile with their username but
they control what information is in it. Profiles can NEVER include
personally identifying information like phone numbers and addresses.

I hope this answers your question and concern. We understand that since
PL8SCAN is so new and innovative there's going to be some concerns
about safety and we encourage anyone with questions like this to ask.

You may want to take a look at the blog entry titled "Sticky notes on a
bulletin board" at . It explains how
PL8SCAN works with an analogy that might help make it clearer.

I hope this answers the question about safety. If you still have concerns please feel free to contact us at our help page or post a question on the discussion group.

Then how do you deliver text messages?

Good question. Keep the bulletin board in mind. Lets say you have a license plate you're interested in and you want to know right away whenever a message is posted to that license plate. You could go online every few minutes and Scan for messages but that's not very practical is it.

One of the biggest benefits of membership is that PL8SCAN will do the scanning for you and that's exactly how we deliver text messages. You tell us the license plate you're interested in and whenever there's a message posted to it we'll immediately send you an email and/or a text message if you request it. The email or text message comes from PL8SCAN - NOT from the person that Posted the original message. By acting as the go between we keep both parties anonymous. The sender has no idea if anyone else gets the message unless someone replies.

Text messages do include usernames so when you get one you can reply with the TAG keyword or just ignore it. Once you send a TAG reply the original sender and yourself have now established a private communication via usernames and of course PL8SCAN will continue to show as the sender. No cell phone numbers are ever passed via PL8SCAN text messages unless you add it to a message manually.

If you get text messages you don't want you can either block that username or stop all text messaging at any time with the keyword STOP. You're in complete control and can change things as often as you want.

Next post I'll talk about profiles and PL8Boxes...

Did this one help?

Sticky notes on a bulletin board

We thought one good way to explain what we do and how we do it would be to provide a sort of visual explanation - so here goes...

Imagine a giant bulletin board covered with yellow "sticky" notes. At the top of each note is a license plate and below that is a message - any kind of message. The notes are arranged on the board by order of the license plate on the note. So if you wanted to find messages for a specific license plate you'd just go to the spot on the board where that license plate should be and look for notes with that license plate written on it.

When you Post a message at PL8SCAN in essence all you're doing is creating a sticky note with a license plate and a message and we put it in order on the bulletin board. When you Scan for messages to a license plate you're just looking at the spot on the board where that license plate should be to see if there are any messages.

With this visual in mind hopefully I can now answer the top question we get. How do you know who owns a license plate and is it safe?

The short answers are: We don't and Yes. When someone Posts a message they don't need and don't get any information about the owner of the license plate. PL8SCAN doesn't even have that information. Secondly, when someone Scans for messages they get no information about how wrote them except if the writer was a PL8SCAN member and chose to include their username in the message.

Hoping to help...

When we were preparing to launch PL8SCAN we struggled over how to explain it. Because it's such a new concept we really couldn't compare it to anything and say "Hey we're the best ...!". We worried that although it's a simple concept most people would probably form an opinion quickly before they really understood what we do and how we do it. So what to do? Short and simple or long detailed explanations? We decided to try a little of both. Short and to the point as in our flash piece on the Home page plus detailed explanations as in the FAQ.

Turns out we could have done a better job because it's apparent that there are misunderstandings about PL8SCAN. We've read about safety and legality concerns, that it's only useful to members, that we only do text messaging, that we only have canned messages etc. In order to address some of these issues we felt a blog would be a good forum for people to read and comment about their specific questions. Thus this page was born. We'll attempt to address some of these misunderstandings in future posts but feel free to ask and comment here anytime. We'll answer as quick as we can. If you don't see what you're looking for here feel free to email us at PL8-Feedback@PL8SCAN.com. Thanks for stopping by!