All 100 ideasPrivacy and security
#34 of 100 · Privacy and security
Turn off phone-home everywhere
Open tools or guides that strip tracking, ads and phone-home behaviour from Windows, smart TVs, cars, printers and phones.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private100%
- Object to subscriptions0%
- Want it open source or self-hosted27%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 11 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Tried, never finished4 Show HN launches do part of this. None does the whole job.
Instead of: Windows
The idea, as matched
An open-source tool or guide that finds and switches off telemetry, ads and phone-home behaviour on Windows and on smart devices such as TVs, cars, printers and phones.
Jev first matched 16 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 11 of 16.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Split between Windows privacy tools and device hacks.
- Sep 2026Wants a free open-source alternative to O&O ShutUp10 for disabling Windows tracking. Read it: a comment in “O&O ShutUp10 – The antispy tool for Windows 10 and 11”
- Jan 2026Wants someone to hack Roku devices so the ads can be stripped out. Read it: a comment in “Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids”
- Jun 2024Wants a website guiding how to disable the cellular chip for each car model. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: Why is nobody manufacturing low tech electric cars in 2024?”
- Apr 2024Wants a printer firmware that is open and free of vendor malware and document sampling. Read it: a comment in “HP Disables Printer Functionality Until You Install the HP Smart App”
- Jan 2024Wants a tool to check that Windows tracking, Bing, IE and similar features are all off or removed. Read it: a comment in “Windows XP 2024 Edition is everything I want from a new OS”
- Dec 2023Wants a data sinkhole device that can be added to a car to block its data sharing. Read it: a comment in “US Senator: What Do Our Cars Know? and Who Do They Share That Information With?”
- Sep 2022Wants a rooting tool for Roku TVs like RootMyTV, since Pi-hole no longer blocks their ads. Read it: a comment in “RootMyTV is a user-friendly exploit for rooting/jailbreaking LG webOS smart TVs”
- Oct 2020Wants an open-source Windows privacy tool like ShutUp10 that scores well on every comparison criterion. Read it: a comment in “Bing is now Microsoft Bing as the search engine gets a rebrand”
- Mar 2017Wants a script that fixes Windows 10 privacy settings for a new user account without hunting obscure settings. Read it: a comment in “Windows 10 Tip: Turn Off File Explorer Advertising”
- Aug 2015Wants a DisableWinTracking style tool for Windows 7. Read it: a comment in “Updates Make Windows 7 and 8 Spy on You Like Windows 10”
- Apr 2011Wants a jailbreak app disabling or regularly deleting iPhone location logging, thinking many would pay. Read it: a comment in “IPhones and 3G iPads log your location in an unencrypted file on the device”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.