Your car is tracking you. Abusive partners may be, too
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 narcis- sistic, abusive and unfaith- ful, she said. After one of their fights turned violent in September 2022, Dow- dall, a real estate agent, fled their home in Covington, Louisiana, driving her Mer- cedes-Benz C300 sedan to her daughter’s house near Shreveport, five hours away. She filed a domestic abuse report with police two days later.
Her husband, a Drug Enforcement Administra- tion agent, didn’t want to let her go. He called her repeat- edly, 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, started occa- sionally seeing a strange new message on the display in her Mercedes, about a loca- tion-based service called “mbrace.” The second time it happened, she took a pho- tograph and searched for the name online.
“I realized, oh, my God, that’s him tracking me,” Dowdall said.
“Mbrace” was part of “Mercedes me” — a suite of connected services for the car, accessible via a smart- phone app. Dowdall had only ever used the Mercedes Me app to make auto loan pay- ments. She hadn’t realized that the service could also be used to track the car’s loca- tion. One night, when she vis- ited a male friend’s home, her husband sent the man a message with a thumbs-up emoji. A nearby camera cap- tured his car driving in the area, according to the detec- tive who worked on her case.
Dowdall called Mercedes customer service repeatedly to try to remove her hus- band’s digital access to the car, but the loan and title were in his name, a decision the couple had made because he had a better credit score than hers. 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 rep- resentatives told her that her husband was the customer so he would be able to keep his access. There was no but- ton 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 rep- resentatives told Dowdall.
A spokesperson for Mer- cedes-Benz said the company did not comment on “indi- vidual customer matters.”
Privacy advocates are con- cerned by how car compa- nies are using and sharing consumers’ data — with insurance companies, for exam- ple — and drivers’ inability to turn the data collection off. California’s privacy regulator is investigating the auto industry.
Detective Kelly Downey of the Bossier Parish Sheriff ’s Office, who investigated Dow- dall’s husband for stalking, also reached out to Mercedes more than a dozen times to no avail, she said. She had previously dealt with another case of harassment via a con- nected car app — a woman whose husband would turn on her Lexus while it sat 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.
“Automobile manufactur- ers have to create a way for us to stop it,” Downey said. “Technology may be our god- send, but it’s also very scary because it could hurt you.”
Mercedes also failed to respond to a search warrant, Downey said. She instead 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 last year and paid $400 to disable the remote tracking. This also disabled the car’s navigation system and its 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 Dowdall, whose husband died by suicide in November. “Car manufacturers should give the ability to turn this tracking off.”