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Cross-Make 'Car Lobotomy' Service and Per-VIN Guide That Shows Exactly What Your Car Collects and How to Shut the Telemetry Off Without Killing Safety Features

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Privacy-conscious car owners reacting to fresh reporting on how much modern vehicles record and sell are trading DIY hacks on HN (pull fuse 8, yank the cellular/TCU bridge, flip flags in ForScan, even desolder the chips) and one says outright that he would pay for a professional version. They want a plain-language, cross-make tool or service that tells them what their specific vehicle collects and exactly how to disable it, software-only where possible, without breaking OTA updates, eCall, or other safety systems.

builder note

The defensible product is the per-VIN knowledge base plus a vetted local-shop or mobile-mechanic network, not a magic universal off switch. Lead with 'here is what you keep and what you lose on YOUR model' because the trap is that newer cars bake the modem into safety-critical modules with no clean disconnect, and promising total silence will get someone's eCall or ABS killed.

landscape (3 existing solutions)

Disabling car telemetry is possible but the how-to is splintered across brand forums and one-off diagnostic tools, with real risk of breaking safety or CAN-bus functions. Nothing gives a typical owner a safe, model-specific, step-by-step answer for their exact vehicle, and newer cars deliberately make the modem harder to isolate.

ForScan Ford/Mazda/Lincoln only, requires an OBD adapter and comfort editing module configs, throws persistent errors when the TCU is disabled, and kills FordPass / remote start in the process. Useless to the average owner and to anyone not driving a Ford.
Privacy4Cars (Vehicle Privacy Report) Built around deleting personal data when you sell or rent a car and showing a transparency report of what a model collects. It does not stop the manufacturer's ongoing telemetry on a car you keep, which is the thing owners in the thread actually want shut off.
Brand-forum DIY threads (Maverick Truck Club, Ford Transit USA Forum, etc.) The real knowledge lives in scattered per-model forum posts. It is fragmented, brand-specific, and risky (on some cars the TCU also terminates the CAN bus, so unplugging it can break the vehicle). No consolidated, vetted, model-aware answer exists.

sources (1)

hn https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48318481 "I would pay for a car lobotomy service." 2026-05-29
privacyautomotiveright-to-repairtelemetrydata-brokers