Ripping the Modem Out of a 2024 RAV4: A Hardware Privacy Guide

What happened

Arkadiy Tetelman, a security engineer known for his work on application security and bug bounties, published a detailed technical walkthrough of removing the cellular modem (Data Communication Module, or DCM) and GPS antenna from his 2024 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid. The post, which quickly hit 370+ points on Hacker News, documents the exact hardware involved, the disassembly steps, and the before-and-after behavior of the vehicle's systems.

The motivation is straightforward: Toyota's connected services collect and transmit vehicle location, driving behavior, speed, braking patterns, and diagnostic data over an embedded cellular connection — and the owner has no software-level way to fully disable it. Toyota's privacy policy for connected services grants the company broad rights to share aggregated and, in some cases, individualized data with third-party partners, including insurance data brokers. For a security-minded owner, the only reliable opt-out is removing the hardware.

The RAV4 Hybrid, like most post-2020 Toyotas, ships with an embedded telematics control unit (TCU) that maintains a persistent cellular connection independent of the owner's phone or infotainment preferences. Even if you decline the connected services subscription, the modem remains active and capable of transmitting data. Toyota isn't unique here — GM, Ford, Hyundai, and most major OEMs have similar always-on telematics — but Toyota's market share (the RAV4 has been America's best-selling non-truck for years) makes this a particularly high-impact example.

Why it matters

The connected car privacy problem is one that the developer community has been warning about for years, and it's now reaching a tipping point. A 2023 Mozilla Foundation study rated every major car brand "F" on privacy, calling modern vehicles "the worst category of products for privacy we have ever reviewed." Cars now collect more personal data than phones or laptops, but with far fewer user controls and almost no transparency about what's transmitted.

What makes Tetelman's post significant isn't the act of removing a modem — hobbyists have been doing this since OnStar became standard in GM vehicles. It's the meticulous documentation aimed at a technical audience, demonstrating that the process is reversible, doesn't void core warranty coverage (Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act protects modifications unrelated to a claimed defect), and leaves every critical vehicle system intact. The DCM is architecturally isolated from the CAN bus systems that control drivetrain, braking, and safety features. Disconnecting it is closer to unplugging a peripheral than performing surgery.

The Hacker News discussion surfaced several important threads. Multiple commenters reported that Toyota dealers had told them there was "no way" to disable data collection, which is technically true at the software level — there's no menu toggle that stops the DCM from phoning home. Others pointed out that some insurance companies, notably LexisNexis and Verisk, have been caught building driver risk profiles from OEM telematics data without explicit driver consent, leading to premium increases. In at least one documented case, a driver's insurance rates increased 21% based on telematics data they never knowingly shared.

The regulatory landscape is fragmented. California's CCPA and the EU's GDPR theoretically give owners the right to opt out of data collection, but enforcement against automakers has been essentially nonexistent. The FTC has signaled interest — Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya called connected car data practices "surveillance pricing" in a 2025 hearing — but no formal rulemaking has materialized. Meanwhile, several state legislatures have introduced "connected car privacy" bills that would require explicit opt-in consent for telematics data collection, though none have passed as of May 2026.

What this means for your stack

If you're a developer working on IoT, embedded systems, or automotive software, this story is a case study in how architectural decisions create (or prevent) user agency. The fact that Toyota's DCM is a discrete, removable module rather than an integrated SoC is an accident of automotive supply chain modularity — not a deliberate privacy design choice — but it's exactly what makes physical opt-out possible. As vehicles move toward centralized compute architectures (Tesla's approach, now being adopted by others), this kind of hardware-level intervention becomes significantly harder.

For developers building connected products more broadly, the lesson is clear: if your telemetry system doesn't offer a genuine, verifiable off switch, technically sophisticated users will find one — and they'll publish the instructions. The 370-point HN response isn't just enthusiasm for a clever hack; it's latent demand for privacy controls that manufacturers refuse to build. Products that offer transparent, granular data controls as a feature — not a concession — will increasingly win trust in a market where the default is silent surveillance.

If you're personally driving a late-model vehicle and care about this, the practical options are: (1) physically remove the DCM, following guides specific to your make/model, (2) use an OBD-II firewall device that blocks outbound telematics (several open-source projects exist), or (3) wait for regulatory action, which based on current trajectory means waiting a long time.

Looking ahead

The convergence of right-to-repair legislation, connected car privacy advocacy, and open-source automotive tooling is creating a new category of "vehicle sovereignty" projects. We're likely to see more documented teardowns, more OBD-II privacy tools, and eventually OEM responses — either genuine privacy controls or, more likely, architectures that make hardware removal harder. The automakers are in the same position phone manufacturers were in circa 2012: sitting on a data goldmine with minimal regulatory oversight. The question is whether the backlash arrives before the architecture locks down. For the 2024 RAV4, at least, the modem comes out with a 10mm socket and some patience.