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Meet The Pardoned Delete Mechanic Who Wants To Stop Your Car From Spying On You
(excerpts)
Pardoned mechanic Matt Geouge has built a device that blocks vehicles from spying on their drivers, because in 2018 his fiancée realized investigators were following her. Now he braces for steep opposition from manufacturers as he unveils his new product.
Matt Geouge is building a device that blocks vehicles from spying on their drivers, because in 2018 his fiancée noticed grey Toyota Tacomas were following her.
Geouge had started a smalltime diesel operation in his mother’s garage in Hendersonville, North Carolina, his senior year of high school. As emissions systems on diesel trucks grew more constraining throughout the early 2000s, Geouge started writing “delete” software tunes that let trucks disobey the systems and regain their horsepower.
That got farmers’ and truckers’ rigs out of the emissions handicap, or “limp” mode. It also snowballed into a multi-million-dollar business and earned widespread renown for Geouge, at least in Ford aftermarket circles.
But Geouge’s work also landed him in the federal government’s crosshairs because deleting runs afoul of federal emissions laws.
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In late autumn 2019, Geouge spent 20 hours of garage time dismantling and scouring his 2017 F350 for a GPS tracking device.
He found none.
But he found the “black box” telematics modem – standard in newer-model vehicles – the satellite radio antenna, and the GPS hardware. He ripped them out.
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On July 3 of this year, President Donald Trump pardoned Geouge and eight other diesel techs.
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To Geouge, another injustice remained: Modern cars spy on their drivers.
Newer model vehicles contain black box telematics devices, GPS tracking, smartphone integration systems, and other infotainment systems that lift users’ data.
For example, cars can watch their drivers with cameras, including for fatigue and distraction. Numerous newer models have in-cabin microphones.
Audi’s privacy statement for model years 2019 and newer says the car system can disclose the driver’s data “to third parties for their own marketing purposes.” The company may disclose “information about you and your vehicle” to law enforcement or others when it has reason to believe someone is being harmed, the agreement says.
A privacy notice by FCA US, the parent company to Jeep, Dodge, Ram, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, and Fiat, says the company may collect information from mobile devices and may track the driver “to provide tailored services.”
It also may collect telematics information through the vehicle itself “that concern your vehicle and driving patterns,” and under a broad definition of user consent, share that data with third parties or insurance companies.
Satellite radio company Sirius XM’s privacy agreement says it will, as the law and user allow, sell or share sensitive personal data, precise geolocation and other data to targeted advertising entities and analytics providers.
These realities superimposed on the Geouge couple’s own experiences put them in survival mode, Jackson said.
Then that dawned into the realization others are facing the same dystopia, she added.
Geouge has now launched a new business, Spartan Countermeasures, and is in the beta-testing phase of his new telematics and data router. He cast the project as a welcome reset: this product is legal.
“We built it because we realized that if an advanced technical mind like Matt’s didn’t engineer a physical firewall to stop the tracking, nobody would or even could,” Jackson said.
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Geouge filed for a patent in March 2025, to build and market a hardware device that acts like a train track directional switch. Wired on one end through the auxiliary switch, the device’s other end links to the black box and other data-transmitting devices and lets them operate as normal.
But when the user switches the device to “off,” it reroutes the radio frequency signals into a ground plane on a circuit board instead, said Geouge. It grounds the antenna circuit to his circuit board instead of the atmosphere from which it’s trying to read the circuit, he added.
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2026/09/25/meet-the-pardoned-delete-mechanic-who-wants-to-stop-your-car-from-spying-on-you/