Your car follows you. Abusive partners can be too.

After almost ten 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, Ms. Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, La., and drove her Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan to her daughter’s home near Shreveport , five hours drive. Two days later she reported domestic violence to the police.

Her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, wouldn’t 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.

Mrs Dowdall, 59, would occasionally see a strange new message on the display of her Mercedes, about a location-based service called ‘mbrace’. The second time it happened, she took a picture and searched for the name online.

“I realized, oh my God, he’s following me,” Ms. Dowdall said.

‘Mbrace’ was part of ‘Mercedes me’ – a range of connected services for the car, accessible via a smartphone app. Ms Dowdall had only used the Mercedes Me app to pay off car loans. She hadn’t realized that the service could also be used to track the car’s location. While visiting a male friend’s house one evening, 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 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 his name, a decision the couple made because he had a better credit score than hers . Even though she made the payments, had a restraining order against her husband and was allowed exclusive use of the car during the divorce proceedings, Mercedes representatives told her that her husband was the customer so he could retain his access. There was no button she could press to disconnect the app from the vehicle.

“This isn’t the first time I’ve 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.”

For the driver, a car can feel like a refuge. 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 few places in our lives that are less private.

Modern cars are called ‘smartphones with wheels’ because they are connected to the internet and have numerous data collection methods, from cameras and seat weight sensors that register how hard you brake and turn. Most drivers don’t realize how much information their car collects and who has access to it, says Jen Caltrider, a privacy researcher at Mozilla who privacy policy of more than 25 car brands and found surprising revelations, such as Nissan saying it might collect information about “sexual activity.”

“People think their car is private,” Ms. Caltrider said. “With a computer you know where the camera is and you can put tape over it. Once you buy a car and notice that it compromises privacy, what should you do?

Privacy advocates are concerned about how car companies use and share consumer data – with insurance companies, For example – and the inability of drivers to disable data collection. California’s privacy regulator investigates the automotive industry.

For car owners, the benefit of this data palooza 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; to lock and unlock the vehicle remotely; and to enable or disable it. Some apps can even remotely adjust the car’s climate control, 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 deployed in abusive relationships, and automakers are unwilling to help victims. This is especially complicated when the victim is a co-owner of the car, or is not listed on the title.

Detective Kelly Downey of the Bossier Parish Sheriff’s Office, who was investigating Ms. Dowdall’s husband for stalking, also contacted Mercedes more than a dozen times, but to no avail, she said. She had previously handled another case of harassment via a connected car app: a woman whose husband turned on her Lexus while it was in the garage in the middle of the night. In that case too, Detective Downey was unable to get the car company to cut off the husband’s access; the victim sold her car.

“Automakers need to create a way for us to stop this,” Detective Downey said. “Technology may be our gift from heaven, but it is also very scary because it can hurt you.”

Mercedes also failed to respond to a search warrant, Detective Downey said. Instead, she found evidence that the man was using the Mercedes Me app by obtaining data about his internet activities.

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 SOS button, a tool to get help in an emergency.

‘I didn’t care. I just didn’t want him to know where I was,” said Mrs Dowdall, whose husband committed suicide last month. “Automakers should offer the option to disable this tracking.”

Eva Galperin, an expert on technology-enabled domestic violence at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said she has seen another case where an abuser used a car app to track a victim’s movements, and that the victim did not realize this because she “isn’t the one who set it up.”

“As far as I know, there are no guides on how to lock your partner out of the car after you’ve broken up,” Ms. Galperin said.

Monitors have tracked their victims’ cars in the past using GPS devices and Apple AirTags, Ms. Galperin said, but connected car apps offer new opportunities for harassment.

A San Francisco man used his remote access to the Tesla Model Superior Court.Reuters reported this earlier on 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 the heat turned up so high it was uncomfortably warm, while on cold days she would find the air conditioning had been turned on from afar. Her husband, she said in court documents, used the location search function on the Tesla to identify her new residence, which she had tried to keep secret from him.

The woman, who had a restraining order against her husband, contacted Tesla several times to have her husband’s access to the car revoked – she included some of the emails in legal files – but was Not successful.

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment. In legal documents, Tesla denied responsibility for the harassment; wondered whether this had occurred, based on the husband’s denials; and raised questions about the woman’s reliability. (Some of what she claimed her husband did, such as turning on songs with disturbing lyrics while she was driving, couldn’t be done through the Tesla app.)

“Virtually every major automaker offers its customers a mobile app with similar features,” 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 “difficult” to expect automakers to determine which claims of app abuse were legitimate.

Katie Ray-Jones, the CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, said abusers were using a wide range 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 importance to domestic violence shelters, she said, as they “try to keep the location of the shelter confidential.”

As a preventative measure, Ms. Ray-Jones encourages people in relationships to have equal access to technologies used to monitor their homes and assets.

“If there’s an app that controls your car, you both should have access to it,” she said.

Adam Dodge, a former family law attorney turned digital safety trainer, called car app stalking “a blind spot for victims and car manufacturers.”

“Most victims I’ve spoken to are completely unaware that the car they rely on is even connected via an app,” he said. “They can’t address threats they don’t know are there.”

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 violence to easily separate their phones from accounts shared with their abusers. A similar law should extend to cars, Mr. Dodge said, allowing people with protective 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 make the choice between being stalked by a car or not having a car. But that is the crossroads that many of them find themselves at.”