After almost 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall wanted to separate. Her husband was no longer the charming man she had fallen in love with. He had become narcissistic, abusive and unfaithful, she said. After one of their fights turned violent in September 2022, Ms. Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled her home in Covington, Louisiana, driving her Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan to her daughter's home near Shreveport, five hours away. Two days later, she filed a domestic abuse complaint with police.
Her husband, a DEA agent, didn't want to let her go. He called her repeatedly, she said, first begging her to come back and then threatening her. She stopped responding to him, she said, even though he texted and called her hundreds of times.
Ms Dowdall, 59, began occasionally seeing a strange new message on the screen of her Mercedes, about a location-based service called “mbrace”. The second time it happened, she took a photo and looked up the name online.
“I realized, oh my God, that he was the one following me,” Dowdall said.
“Mbrace” was part of “Mercedes me”, a set of connected car services, accessible through a smartphone application. Ms Dowdall had only used the Mercedes Me app to make car loan payments. She hadn't realized that the service could also be used to track the car's location. One night when she visited a friend's house, her husband messaged her with a thumbs-up emoji. A nearby camera captured her car driving through the area, according to the detective who worked on her case.
Mrs Dowdall repeatedly called Mercedes customer service to try to remove her husband's digital access to the car, but the loan and title were in her name, a decision the couple had made because he had a better score. credit than hers. Although she was making the payments, had a restraining order against her husband, and had been granted exclusive use of the car during the divorce proceedings, Mercedes representatives told her that her husband was the customer, so she could keep her access. There was no button she could press to remove the app's connection to the vehicle.
“This is not the first time I have heard something like this,” one of the representatives told Ms. Dowdall.
A Mercedes-Benz spokeswoman said the company did not comment on “individual customer matters.”
A car, to its driver, can seem like a sanctuary. A place to sing off-key to your favorite songs, cry, vent, or drive somewhere no one knows you're going.
But in truth, there are few places in our lives that are less private.
Modern cars have been called “smartphones on wheels” because they are connected to the Internet and have countless data collection methods, from technology/tesla-workers-shared-sensitive-images-recorded-by-customer-cars-2023-04-06/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>cameras and seat weight sensors to record how hard you brake and corner. Most drivers don't realize how much information their cars collect and who has access to it, said Jen Caltrider, a Mozilla privacy researcher who reviewed the privacy policies of more than 25 car brands and found surprising revelations, such as Nissan saying it could collect information about “sexual activity.”
“People think their car is private,” Caltrider said. “With a computer, you know where the camera is and you can put tape on it. Once you've bought a car and discover that it doesn't respect privacy, what are you supposed to do?
Privacy advocates are concerned about the way car companies use and share consumer data (with insurance companies, For example – and the inability of drivers to disable data collection. California Privacy Regulator is investigating the automotive industry.
For car owners, the benefit of this palaooza of data has come in the form of smartphone apps that allow them to check the location of a car when, for example, they forget where it is parked; lock and unlock the vehicle remotely; and to turn it on or off. Some apps can even remotely set the car's climate controls, sound the horn, or turn on the lights. After setting up the app, the car owner can grant access to a limited number of other drivers.
Domestic violence experts say these convenience features are being used as a weapon in abusive relationships and that automakers have been unwilling to help victims. This is particularly complicated when the victim is a part owner of the car or is not listed on the title.
Detective Kelly Downey of the Bossier Parish Sheriff's Office, who investigated Dowdall's husband for harassment, also contacted Mercedes more than a dozen times without success, she said. She had previously dealt with another case of harassment through a connected car app: a woman whose husband started her Lexus while she was in the garage in the middle of the night. Again, Detective Downey couldn't get the car company to lock her husband out; The victim sold her car.
“Car manufacturers have to create a way to stop it,” Detective Downey said. “technology can be our blessing, but it's also very scary because it could hurt you.”
Mercedes also did not respond to a search warrant, Detective Downey said. Instead, he found evidence that her husband was using the Mercedes Me app by obtaining logs of her Internet activity.
Unable to get help from Mercedes, Ms. Dowdall took her car to an independent mechanic this year and paid $400 to disable the remote tracking. This also disabled the car's navigation system and its SOS button, a tool for getting help in an emergency.
“I did not care. I just didn't want him to know where she was,” said Dowdall, whose husband committed suicide last month. “Car manufacturers should offer the ability to disable this tracking.”
Eva Galperin, an expert on domestic abuse through technology at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she has seen another case of an abuser who used a car app to track a victim's movements, and that the The victim did not realize it because she “is not the one who prepared it.”
“As far as I know, there are no guidelines on how to leave your partner out of the car after a breakup,” Galperin said.
Controlling partners have tracked their victims' cars in the past using GPS devices and Apple AirTags, Galperin said, but connected car apps offer new opportunities for stalking.
A San Francisco man used his remote access to the Tesla Modeltechnology/an-abused-wife-took-tesla-over-tracking-tech-she-lost-2023-12-19/” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Reuters previously reported if.)
According to a court complaint against her husband and Tesla, the car's lights and horn were activated in a parking lot. On hot days, she would arrive at her car to find that the heater was running so that it was uncomfortably hot, while on cold days, she would find that the air conditioning had been turned on from afar. Her husband, she said in court documents, used the Tesla's location search function to identify her new residence, which she hoped to keep secret.
The woman, who obtained a restraining order against her husband, contacted Tesla numerous times to have her husband's access to the car revoked (she included some of the emails in legal filings), but was unsuccessful.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. In legal filings, Tesla denied his responsibility for the harassment; he questioned whether it had happened, based on his husband's denials; and he raised questions about the woman's trustworthiness. (Some of the things she said her husband had done, like playing songs with disturbing lyrics while he drove, couldn't be done through the Tesla app.)
“Virtually every major automaker offers a mobile app with similar features to their customers,” Tesla lawyers wrote in a legal filing. “It is illogical and impractical to expect Tesla to monitor every vehicle owner's mobile app for misuse.”
A judge dismissed Tesla from the case, saying it would be “onerous” to expect automakers to determine which claims of app abuse were legitimate.
Katie Ray-Jones, executive director of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said abusive partners used a wide variety of internet-connected devices, from laptops to smart home products, to track and harass their victims. technology that monitors a person's movements is of particular concern to domestic violence shelters, she said, because “they try to keep the location of the shelter confidential.”
As a preventive measure, Ms. Ray-Jones encourages people in relationships to have equal access to the technologies used to monitor their homes and belongings.
“If there is an app that controls your car, you both need to have access to it,” he said.
Adam Dodge, a former family law attorney turned digital safety trainer, called car app stalking “a blind spot for victims and automakers.”
“Most victims I've spoken to are completely unaware that the car they trust is connected to an app,” he said. “They can't address threats they don't know exist.”
As a possible solution to the problem, he and other domestic violence experts pointed to the Secure Connections Act, a recent federal law that allows victims of domestic abuse to easily separate their phone from accounts shared with their abusers. A similar law should extend to cars, Dodge said, allowing people with court protection orders to easily cut off an abuser's digital access to their car.
“Having access to a car for a victim is a lifesaver,” he said. “No victim should have to choose between being harassed by the car or not having a car. But that is the crossroads that many of them find themselves at.”
