alt Hacker NewsU.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app
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This "car-tinkering app" is used as a glorified GameShark for deleting factory emissions controls, I don't feel sorry for anyone who uses this to roll coal or whatever. Instead of investigating everyone on the list of users of this app, should the government instead ban diesel engines knowing their emissions controls software will be defeated? Should environmental regulations be relaxed? What is really the solution here?
It will start with subpoenaing this information against people who modified their car to do "bad" things. But once they have the precedent, I would predict that it will very quickly be used at the behest of car manufacturers to go after people who modify their cars to, say, disable GPS tracking.
That's why you should be downloading from F-Droid anonymously.
This is a classic cautionary tale for the over-centralization of app distribution.
This is outrageous, especially since there are many other ways that you could violate emissions laws.
If they really cared they could equip federal agents, and state/local police with testing equipment. It is easy to see/hear vehicles that are likely to be violating these rules. Heck, make a hotline, I would rat them out all day. Just incorporate it with rate-limiting how often each vehicle could get pulled over for it, so it doesn't get abused.
This really comes down to corporations and the government colluding to make us not actually own anything. The fact that they would refer to a tool for making modifications to your car a "defeat device" is so telling. Coupled with phones not allowing side loading is really fucked up.
Everything is awful, and it's been getting worse for as long as I can remember. I think I'm going to lose it and just cut ties with the internet, and computers in general very soon. The power, and freedom I used to feel has been replaced with oppression disguised as convenience. One Token Ring to rule them all.
> These tools allegedly allow users to bypass factory emissions controls on diesel vehicles
Oh so AdBlue shortage is about to hit the US too?
> It has already submitted forum posts and social media evidence showing some users employing the system to disable emissions controls.
Is right-to-repair going to get scrod by illegal activity, like everyone got scrod by media piracy?
We knew we'd get scrod back when MP3 piracy started, and many people were warned what would happen, but they still did it, and it played out just like was warned.
Illegal activity creates both reason and pretext for forcibly taking away what should be rights. And those rights will be forcibly taken away, for both reasons. Often by crappy people, because you either forced their hand, or you handed the pretext to them on a silver platter.
This is one reason for tech freedom advocates to fully appreciate that they're operating in a political context, so that they're a sustainable positive force, not a counterproductive one.
I am surprised that a lawsuit started in 2021 about maintaining emission standards survived up to this point. The DOGE search terms must have misspelled "emission"
So if someone used this app to do something illegal with his car (rolling coal or otherwise), is he really going to testify in court that he did this? The lawsuit is only against EZ Lynk, but it's conceivable that he could face his own consequences later.
I was concerned because I'm about to spend a few coffees on OBD-II scanning apps, but since this particular app is an emissions defeat device, good.
This is the... *checking notes* ... second thing this administration has done that seems reasonable, or at least not overtly evil.
Will this turn into be a blow to anyone who gains access to the hardware paid with own money?
There are HN commenters ("developers") that want readers to believe that telemetry should be on by default. Maybe some readers, e.g., other "developers", think, "Yeah, that sounds reasonable" so long as the telemetry collecter is a random "developer" and not the government. But they probably fail to consider that this collected data is just a subpoena away from going to the government
Corporate mobile operating systems suck. Including "apps" to run on them, generally
There are some that do not require corporate approval and do not try to phone home but it's a relatively small fraction
Get a warrant…
That's why you use Aurora and F-Droid.
I somehow suspect this is a pretext to ban OBD monitoring/control tools. I have two in my car, one to monitor everything and log the performance, the other to control the gas intake accurately and safely as opposed to non-obd ones. I hope obd won’t become like radar detectors.
This app has legitimate uses (custom tune performance on their engines) and also makes it easy to do illegal things. (Defeat emissions controls and roll coal.) The people who are using it to do illegal things are crying “privacy!” People who break the law generally do want less government power, more anonymity, etc. Sometimes they’ll argue the law is wrong and they should be allowed to break it, but I don’t think we’ll find many sympathizers of that here.
It’s a genuinely complicated issue, and relates to a lot of things in tech and software. But IMHO if an app makes it easy to do something illegal which is otherwise difficult, then there’s reason for the government to be interested. If that app could be written in a way that blocks the illegal behavior, and has chosen not to put those restrictions in place, then I think the government is justified in interfering.
That’s what seems to be happening here. I have a hard time believing that it would be difficult for EZ Lynk to distinguish between a “delete tune” that rolls coal or blows past emission regs and a legitimate clean tune. Maybe some things get blurry around the edges, but they’re clearly not even trying. And you know that’s why this app is popular. The clean tunes just don’t change anything much, because the manufacturer already tunes the engine for maximum legal power, or close to it.
Are there any good open source implementations of these kinds of tools? They really are useful for things other than def deletes (though I support that too)
Welcome to our brave new digital world, governments and DOJs do this because now they can, I am afraid this is only the beginning.
These vehicle emissions laws are almost always fake compliance theater and were dreamed up by idiots. They are a huge drag on the economy and achieve absolutely nothing.
For example, the reason we don’t have super efficient turbodiesel subcompacts that are perfectly legal in the EU is thanks to the so called “Clean” air act. Since the law is based on vehicle weight I can go buy a 8,000 pound truck and commute to work alone in it and pollute all I want. But if I want a super clean 80MPG diesel subcompact that’s 1/4 the gross weight supposedly bad for the environment.
But it gets worse in all sorts of ways, the law grandfathers coal plants from all these emissions standards. One coal plant can emit more pollution than millions of trucks. Guess which polluter the government is aggressively pursuing and violating the rights of? You guessed it, car enthusiasts who downloaded an app. Give me a break.
These companies will likely comply too [1]. Defenders will say "they have to comply with the law" but there's compliance and then there's compliance. For example, an adminstrative subpoena has no power. Companies can and should force the government to go to court and get a court-issued subpoena.
This isn't really anything terribly new either. The government regardless of who the current president is will routinely go after individuals for (allaegedly) hurting coprorate profits. We saw it in the Napster/Limewire era, in the BitTorrent era and even with physical products far earlier than that. There's a ban on importing cars less than 25 years old because Mercedes-Benz dealerships lobbied for a law in the 1980s because too many people were importing them directly from Germany at a lower cost [2].
Heck, 60 years of Cuban embargoes and sanctions as well as the 1954 Guatemala coup were US efforts at the behest of the United Fruit Company. Same thing for oil and the 1953 Iranian coup.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/google-broke-its-promi...
[2]: https://www.jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is...
This does seem like a fishing expedition though there is a facially legitimate purpose.
Fortunately, we have more powerful policy tools to clean the air than attacking individual gearheads... convert America to an electric car system. You need to attack these problems at the point of production. Consumption side approaches are petty and not very effective.
...
Americans: How did you let it get this way?
Worth pointing out that this is part of a much larger encroachment on user privacy, and not just in the US: https://community.qbix.com/t/increasing-state-of-surveillanc...
Lunatic, likely AI generated comments here.
This is an app for deliberately causing pollution. The users of that app should be criminally prosecuted and lose their license/spend a few months in prison. The price differential between this device/app and a generic ODB dongle you can buy on Amazon for ~$10 is entirely made up by the criminal features EZ Lynk offers.
The app being software versus hardware doesn't change the legal or moral situation involving it. Much like the DOJ would demand identities of people importing PlayStation 1 modchips back in the 90s, the users of this equally criminal application will be provided to the DOJ.
There are already proper procedures for doing this. If the users did something illegal, you can go after them. If you prove that somebody actively enabled or encouraged them, you go after them. But even if the app actively enabled or encouraged something (which would still need to be proven) it would be a pretty tall order to prove that Google or Apple actively enabled or encouraged anyone to break the law. Both of them could fight the subpoena, and almost certainly win.
The Department of justice needs witnesses because they’re trying to prove that ez lynk is profiting from the distribution of “emission disabling software” They are not going after any of these individual users. Tldr: they’re trying to get the mod taken off the market.
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Hopefully they hand it over, and all of these people lose their licenses. I'm sick of breathing in their exhaust on the way to work.
I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.
Missing key points:
Why is this administration, which is all for coal, oil, and against environmental policies pursuing THIS?
This DOJ is all about pursuing cases for retribution. It could be, they already know someone they want to punish, and already found they're using the device. Or, use it as a source for finding people they want to punish.
> The government says it needs this information to identify and interview witnesses who can testify about how the tools were actually used.
Why start this whole thing, if you don't already have this information and have people willing to help you as witnesses?
Sounds to me they're saying they don't have this already, but why is this investigation happening in the first place then? Rather than finding every user of the tool, find the users who use the tool in the way you don't approve of, then request the information for those?
Really bananas approach to go for "Every single user of the app" and "Everyone who bought a dongle" when it has very real and legal use cases.