By: Kashmir Hill
Apps that remotely track and control cars are being weaponized by abusive partners. Car manufacturers have been slow to respond, according to victims and experts.
After almost 10 years of marriage, Christine Dowdall, wanted out. In September 2022, Dowdall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, La., driving her Mercedes-Benz C300 sedan to her daughter’s house near Shreveport. Her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, didn’t want to let her go.
Ms. Dowdall, 59, started occasionally seeing a strange new message on the display in her Mercedes, about a location-based service called “mbrace.” The second time it happened, she took a photograph and searched for the name online.
“I realized, oh my God, that’s him tracking me,” Ms. Dowdall said.
“Mbrace” was part of “Mercedes me” — a suite of connected services for the car, accessible via a smartphone app. Ms. Dowdall had only ever used the Mercedes Me app to make auto 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 male friend’s home, 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.
Ms. Dowdall called Mercedes customer service repeatedly to try to remove her husband’s digital access to the car, but the loan and title were in his name. Even though she was making the payments, had a restraining order against her husband, and had been granted sole use of the car during divorce proceedings, Mercedes representatives told her that her husband was the customer so he would be able to keep his access. There was no button she could press to take away the app’s connection to the vehicle.
“This is not the first time that I’ve heard something like this,” one of the representatives told Ms. Dowdall.
A spokeswoman for Mercedes-Benz said the company did not comment on “individual customer matters.”
A car, to its driver, can feel like a sanctuary. A place to sing favorite songs off key, to cry, to vent or to drive somewhere no one knows you’re going.
Modern cars have been called “smartphones with wheels” because they are internet-connected and have myriad methods of data collection, 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 disclosures, 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’ve bought a car and you find it is bad at privacy, what are you supposed to do?”
Privacy advocates are concerned by how car companies are using and sharing consumers’ data — with insurance companies, for example — and drivers’ inability to turn the data collection off.
For car owners, the upside of this data-palooza has come in the form of smartphone apps that allow them to check a car’s location when, say, they forget where it is parked; to lock and unlock the vehicle remotely; and to turn it on or off. Some apps can even remotely set the car’s climate controls, make the horn honk or turn on its lights. After setting up the app, the car’s owner can grant access to a limited number of other drivers.
- Controlling partners
Controlling partners have tracked their victims’ cars in the past using GPS devices and Apple AirTags.
A San Francisco man used his remote access to the Tesla Model X sport utility vehicle he co-owned with his wife to harass her after they separated, according to a lawsuit she filed anonymously in San Francisco Superior Court in 2020.
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 arrive at her car and discover the heat was running so that it was uncomfortably hot, while on cold days, she would find that the air-conditioner had been activated from afar. Her husband, she said in court documents, used the location-finding feature on the Tesla to identify her new residence, which she had hoped to keep secret from him.
The New York Times
