by After almost 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall wanted out. 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, 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. . She filed a domestic abuse report with the police two days later.
Her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, didn’t want to let her go. He called her several times, she said, first pleading with her to return, and then threatening her. She stopped responding to him, she said, even though he texted and called her hundreds of times.
Dowdall, 59, began to occasionally see a strange new message on the display in his Mercedes, about a location-based service called “brace.” The second time it happened, she took a photo and searched the name online.
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“I realized, oh my God, he’s tracking me,” Dowdall said.
“Mbrace” was part of “Mercedes me” – a suite of connected services for the car, accessed via a smartphone app. Dowdall only used the Mercedes Me app to make car loan payments. She did not realize that the service could also be used to track the location of the car. One night, when she visited a male friend’s house, her husband sent the man a message with a thumbs up emoji. A nearby camera captured his car driving in the area, according to the detective who worked on her case.
Dowdall called Mercedes customer service several times to try to remove her husband’s digital access to the car, but the loan and title were in his name, a decision the couple made because he had a better credit score than she had. Although she was making the payments, had a restraining order against her husband and was allowed sole use of the car during divorce proceedings, Mercedes representatives told her that her husband was the customer and would be able to maintain access. There was no button she could push to disconnect the app from the vehicle.
“It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this,” one of the representatives told Dowdall.
A spokesman for Mercedes-Benz said the company did not comment on “individual customer matters.”
A car, for its driver, can feel like a haven. A place to sing your favorite songs off-key, to cry, to vent or to drive somewhere no one knows you’re going.
But in truth, there are few places in our lives that are not so private.
Modern cars have been called “smartphones on wheels” because they are connected to the internet and have a myriad of data collection methods, from cameras and seat weight sensors to records of how hard you brake and corner. Most drivers don’t realize how much information their cars are collecting and who has access to it, said Jen Caltrider, a privacy researcher at Mozilla who reviewed the privacy policies of more than 25 car brands and found surprising revelations, such as Nissan saying. 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 tape it. When you’ve bought a car and it has bad privacy, what are you going to do?”
Privacy advocates are concerned about how car companies are using and sharing consumer data — with insurance companies, for example — and the inability of drivers to turn off data collection. California’s privacy regulator is investigating the auto industry.
For car owners, it’s in the form of smartphone apps that enable them to check a car’s location when they forget, say, where it’s parked; remotely lock and unlock the vehicle; and to turn it on or off. Some apps can even remotely set the car’s climate controls, sound the horn or turn on its 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 weaponized in abusive relationships, and automakers have been unwilling to help victims. This is particularly complicated when the victim is a joint owner of the car or is not named on the title.
Detective Kelly Downey of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office, who investigated Dowdall’s husband for stalking, contacted Mercedes more than a dozen times to no avail, she said. She previously dealt with another case of harassment via a connected car app — a woman whose husband would turn on her Lexus while he was sitting in the garage in the middle of the night. In that case, too, Downey was unable to get the car company to turn off the husband’s access; the victim sold her car.
“Car manufacturers have to find a way for us to stop it,” Downey said. “Technology may be our goddess, but it’s also very scary because it can hurt you.”
Mercedes also failed to respond to a search warrant, Downey said. Instead she found evidence that the husband was using the Mercedes Me app by obtaining records of his internet activity.
Unable to get help from Mercedes, Dowdall took her car to an independent mechanic this year and paid $400 to disable the remote tracking. This disabled the car’s navigation system and its SOS button, a tool for getting help in an emergency.
“I didn’t care. I didn’t want him to know where I was,” said Dowdall, whose husband died by suicide last month. “Car manufacturers should provide the ability to turn off this tracking.”
Eva Galperin, a tech-enabled domestic abuse expert at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she’s seen another case of injustice using a car app to track a victim’s movements, and didn’t realize the he is a victim because she is not “the one who set him up.”
“As far as I know, there are no instructions on how to lock your partner out of your car after a breakup,” Galperin said.
Control 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 harassment.
A San Francisco man used his remote access to the Tesla Model X SUV he and his wife owned to harass her after they separated, according to a lawsuit she filed anonymously in San Francisco Superior Court in 2020. ( Reuters previously reported the case.)
According to a legal complaint against her husband and Tesla, the car’s lights and horns were activated in a parking garage. On hot days, she would get to her car and find that the heat was running so that it was uncomfortably hot, and on cold days, she would find that the air conditioner had been activated remotely. Her husband, she said in court documents, used the location-finding feature on the Tesla to identify her new residence, which she hoped to keep a secret from him.
The woman, who obtained a restraining order against her husband, contacted Tesla numerous times to revoke her husband’s access to the car – 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 responsibility for the harassment; questioned whether it happened, based on the husband’s denial; and raised questions about the woman’s reliability. (Some of what she claimed her husband did, such as playing songs with disturbing lyrics while she was driving, could not be done through the Tesla app.)
“Almost every major car manufacturer offers a mobile app with similar functions to their customers,” Tesla’s lawyers wrote in a legal filing. “It is illogical and impractical to expect Tesla to monitor every vehicle owner’s mobile app for abuse.”
A judge dismissed Tesla from the case, saying it would be “heavy handed” to expect car manufacturers to decide which app abuse claims were legitimate.
Katie Ray-Jones, Chief Executive of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said abusive partners used a wide range of internet-connected devices – from laptops to smart home products – to track and harass their victims. on them. Technology that keeps tabs on a person’s movements is of particular concern to domestic violence shelters, she said, because they “try to keep the shelter location confidential.”
As a preventative measure, Ray-Jones encourages people in relationships to have equal access to technologies used to control their homes and belongings.
“If there’s an app that controls your car, you both need to have access to that,” she said.
Adam Dodge, a former family law solicitor and digital safety trainer, claimed the car app was “a blind spot for both victims and perpetrators”.
“Most victims I’ve spoken to don’t even know the car they’re relying on is connected to an app in the first place,” he said. “They can’t deal with threats they don’t know exist.”
As a possible solution to the problem, he and other domestic violence experts pointed to the Safe Connections Act, a recent federal law that allows victims of domestic abuse to easily remove their phone from accounts shared with their abusers. users. A similar law should extend to cars, Dodge said, allowing people with court orders of protection to easily cut off an abuser’s digital access to their car.
“A victim has access to a car as a rescue,” he said. “No victim should have to choose between being car stalked or no car. But that’s the crossroads for many of them.”
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