After nearly 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall wants out. Her husband was no longer the attractive man she had loved. He became narcissistic, abusive and dishonest, she said. After one of their fights turned violent in September 2022, Ms. Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, La., driving his Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan to his 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, doesn’t want to let her go. He called her repeatedly, she said, first begging her to come back, and then threatening her. He never answered, she said, even though he texted and called her hundreds of times.
Ms. Dowdall, 59, started seeing a strange new message on the display in his Mercedes, about a location-based service called “mbrace.” The second time it happened, he took a photo and looked up the name online.
“I realized, oh my God, he’s the one following me,” said Ms. Dowdall.
“Mbrace” is part of “Mercedes me” — a set of connected services for the car, accessible via a smartphone app. Just used by Ms. Dowdall the Mercedes Me app to pay auto loans. He didn’t realize that the service could also be used to track the vehicle’s location. One night, when she was visiting a male friend’s house, her husband sent the man a message with a thumbs-up emoji. A nearby camera caught his car driving in the area, according to the detective who worked on his case.
Ms. repeatedly called. Dowdall 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 made because she had a better credit score than he did. Even though she was making payments, had a restraining order against her husband and was granted sole 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 is no button he can press to disconnect the app from the car.
“It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this,” one of the representatives told Ms. Dowdall.
A spokesman for Mercedes-Benz said the company does not comment on “individual customer matters.”
A car, to its driver, can feel like a sanctuary. A place to sing your favorite songs off-key, cry, vent or drive somewhere no one knows you’re going.
But in reality, there are some areas in our lives that are less private.
Modern cars have been called “smartphones on wheels” because they are connected to the internet and have so many ways of collecting data, from cameras and seat weight sensors to record how hard you brake and corner. Most drivers don’t know 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 shocking disclosures, like Nissan saying it could collect information about “sexual activity.”
“People think their car is private,” Ms. Caltrider. “With a computer, you know where the camera is and you can tape it. Once you buy a car and you see it’s a privacy violation, what are you supposed to do?”
Privacy advocates are concerned about how car companies use and share consumer data — with insurance companies, For example — and drivers’ inability to turn off data collection. California’s privacy regulator is investigating automobile industry.
For car owners, the opposite of this data-palooza comes in the form of smartphone apps that allow them to check a car’s location when, say, they forget where it’s parked; to lock and unlock the vehicle remotely; and to turn it on or off. Some apps can also 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 are not willing to help victims. This is particularly complicated when the victim is a co-owner of the car, or is not named on the title.
Detective Kelly Downey of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office, who investigated the husband of Ms. Dowdall for stalking, also contacted Mercedes more than a dozen times without success, he said. He previously dealt with another case of harassment through a connected car app – a woman whose husband would turn off her Lexus while it sat in the garage in the middle of the night. In that case, too, Detective Downey couldn’t get the car company to turn off the wife’s access; the victim sold his car.
“The auto manufacturers have to come up with a way for us to stop this,” Detective Downey said. “Technology may be our gift, but it’s also scary because you can get hurt.”
Mercedes also failed to respond to a search warrant, Detective Downey said. Instead he found evidence that the husband was using the Mercedes Me app by capturing records of his internet activity.
Unable to get help from Mercedes, Ms. Dowdall took his car to an independent mechanic this year and paid $400 to disable remote monitoring. It also disabled the car’s navigation system and its SOS button, a tool to get help in an emergency.
“I do not care. I just don’t want him to know where I am,” said Ms. Dowdall, whose husband died by suicide last month. “Car manufacturers should provide the ability to turn off this tracking.”
Eva Galperin, an expert on technology-enabled domestic abuse at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she had seen another case of an abuser using a car app to track the motion by a victim, and that the victim didn’t realize it because “He didn’t set it up.”
“As far as I know, there aren’t any guidelines for how to lock your partner out of your car after you break up,” Ms. Galperin.
Control partners have tracked their victims’ vehicles in the past using GPS devices and Apple AirTags, Ms. Galperin, but connected car apps offer new opportunities for harassment.
A San Francisco man used his remote access to the Tesla Model X sport utility vehicle he owns with his wife to harass her after they broke up, according to a lawsuit he filed anonymously in San Francisco Superior Court in 2020. (Reuters previously reported in case.)
According to a legal complaint against his wife and Tesla, the car’s lights and horn were activated in a parking garage. On hot days, he would arrive at his car and find that the heat was running uncomfortably, while on cold days, he would find that the air-conditioner had been activated remotely. Her husband, she said in court documents, used the Tesla’s location-finding feature to identify her new residence, which she hoped to keep from him.
The woman, who obtained a restraining order against her husband, contacted Tesla multiple times to regain 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; asked if this happened, based on the husband’s denials; and raised questions about the woman’s reliability. (Some of the things she said her husband did, like turning on songs with distracting lyrics while she drove, can’t be done through the Tesla app.)
“Almost every major auto manufacturer offers a mobile app with similar functions for their customers,” Tesla’s lawyers wrote in a legal filing. “It is unreasonable 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 car manufacturers to determine which app abuse claims are legitimate.
Katie Ray-Jones, the chief executive of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said abusive partners use 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, he said, because “they’re trying to keep the location of the shelter confidential.”
As a preventive measure, Ms. Ray-Jones people in relationships to have equal access to the technologies used to control their homes and property.
“If there’s an app that controls your car, you both need to have access to that,” he says.
Adam Dodge, a former family law attorney turned digital safety trainer, called car app stalking “a blind spot for victims and automakers.”
“Most of the victims I spoke to were completely unaware that the car they were expecting was connected to the app in the first place,” he said. “They can’t address threats they don’t know are there.”
As a possible solution to the problem, she and other domestic violence experts point to the Safe Connections Act, a recent federal law that allows victims of domestic abuse to easily disconnect their phone from shared accounts to their abusers. A similar law should extend to cars, Mr. Dodge said, allowing people with protection orders from a court to easily cut off an abuser’s digital access to their car.
“Having access to a car for a victim is a lifeline,” he said. “No victim should have to choose between car stalking or no car. But that’s the crossroads many of them find themselves in.”
