I don't disagree with that at all. I never said that insecure unique identifiers weren't useful for tracking. What I said is that a cryptographically system is superior to an insecure system for the purposes of surveillance, because the ability to track is the same, and the quality of data is higher. From this I concluded that surveillance doesn't make sense as a motive for this particular transit market sticking with an older, insecure system.
Your analogy is poor for at least two reasons:
1. Transit cards are generally hidden inside a pocket and can only be read when read by specific machines in close proximity. Whereas number plates are designed to be on display and readable by human eyes from medium distances, or from publicly (or privately) owned cameras over long distances.
2. Your unspoken but implied alternative to the highly trackable number plate is no number plate. Whereas this discussion is discussing a cryptographically insecure transit card as an alternative to a cryptographically secure transit card.
You can achieve both better privacy (e.g. by not revealing the UID to unauthenticated readers, and never in plaintext) and better tracking (by cryptographically authenticating cards to unauthenticated readers), depending on how you structure the system, so I don't think it's possible to intrinsically say one is more private than the other.
Your analogy is poor for at least two reasons:
1. Transit cards are generally hidden inside a pocket and can only be read when read by specific machines in close proximity. Whereas number plates are designed to be on display and readable by human eyes from medium distances, or from publicly (or privately) owned cameras over long distances.
2. Your unspoken but implied alternative to the highly trackable number plate is no number plate. Whereas this discussion is discussing a cryptographically insecure transit card as an alternative to a cryptographically secure transit card.