The rise of ‘smart abuse’
‘My ex was spying on me through my TV’ Home tech – such as smart doorbells and TVs – is increasingly being used as a form of control by abusive partners. So how worried should we be? Rachael Sigee reports Illustrations MICHAĹ BEDNARSKI 30
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birth in the process. And six months into an acrimonious divorce, he was using his last remaining connections to his wife – their shared technology – to terrorise her. Katherine is one of an increasing number of women falling victim to what is known as ‘smart abuse’, realising too late that smarthome technology, designed to enhance and simplify our lives, can have a more sinister use when relationships go wrong. Part of what’s known as the Internet of Things, smart gadgets – like doorbells, light bulbs, security cameras and speakers such as the Amazon Echo and the Apple HomePod – mean our homes are more connected than ever. Many of us innocently, even excitedly, chat away to our smart speaker; or we feel safe because of a security camera app. But, as Katherine’s story shows, these devices have the potential to open us up to unprecedented levels of control and surveillance.
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IT WAS THE THIRD time Katherine* had called out the same engineer to look at her misbehaving boiler when he asked if she had an app that controlled her thermostat. She did not‌ but her soon-to-be ex-husband did. Suddenly, her bewildering central heating – mysteriously on full blast during last summer’s heatwave, then switching itself off every 30 minutes during October’s cold snap – began to make sense. What Katherine now calls ‘the heating game’ had gone on for days at a time as her estranged husband used his remote access to change her smart-heating app settings, despite being in a different country. ‘It was absolutely freezing,’ she remembers. ‘My daughter was cold. It broke my heart.’ Her husband of almost 20 years had left her and their two teenage children in the wake of an affair, emptying the couple’s bank accounts and returning to his country of
* Names have been changed
‘We had a client whose child was given a smart TV as a present, and then found it was being used to spy on her’ no official data on this kind of abuse and only one recorded conviction: in July 2018, electronics expert Ross Cairns was jailed for 11 months for using a smart system to spy on his estranged wife via a wall-mounted iPad. However, women’s charities say they’re seeing a rise in this kind of complaint. Mary, a Women’s Aid helpline worker, cites a case of a menopausal woman whose husband used a smart thermostat to exacerbate her hot flushes. ‘Perpetrators will use anything to control the women they’re in relationships with,’ Mary says. ‘They want to be in charge and to take away her independence.’ Claudia’s* husband was obsessive about control. She describes him as being ‘a fullblown narcissist’ throughout their nine-year relationship and, once she’d filed for divorce, he began using tech to maintain a hold over her. When they were married he installed a doorbell with a built-in camera and microphone that allowed users to see, hear and speak to visitors on the doorstep from an app – but he avoided sharing the technology with her. ‘There were always excuses why he couldn’t help me set it up,’ she remembers. It was only once the couple had separated, but were still using their house as a base for looking after their children, that she discovered the doorbell’s camera was still being monitored by her husband using his app. A sensor recorded every time someone approached the door, so he could see who was visiting the house. He also used it to track Claudia’s movements, watching when she was coming and going and enabling him to turn up uninvited when she was in. Claudia says it’s one of the last ways her husband has been able to threaten her: ‘It’s the only control he still has over me,’ she says. ‘One of my best friends said it’s a bit like a serial killer revisiting the crime scene.’ The Government’s most recent draft of the landmark Domestic Abuse Bill, pubSTELLA | 2 JUN E 2019
Stay in control of your tech
Top tips from Kez Garner of CyberCare All internetenabled home gadgets could potentially be controlled by another person if they have access to the home router or the matching app installed on their phone. This includes smart thermostats, home security cameras, doorbells, speakers, TVs, printers, washing machines, dishwashers, toasters and fridges. If you’re in an abusive relationship or believe someone is interfering with your technology, it’s important not to make major changes that might raise the perpetrator’s suspicion but you should change the default passwords immediately – manufacturers’ reset codes are usually available online. Be the account holder for your broadband and mobile data (and that of your children) so you’ll have full access. Be wary of internetenabled gifts, toys
or phones from a suspected perpetrator. Check your phone and computer settings and ensure they’re not automatically pairing with other home devices without your knowledge. If devices don’t have an on/off switch, unplug them completely to prevent remote activation. Learn how to set up your router, how to connect to it from your phone and how to change the settings. Consider installing a home network monitoring app such as Fing, which shows who is using your network. Keep all codes, PINs and passwords written down in a safe place – not on your phone. For more advice, call the CyberCare helpline on 07496 955219, or the free, 24-hour National Domestic Violence Helpline run by Refuge and Women’s Aid on 0808 200 0247.
lished in January, includes ‘online abuse’, but there’s concern the definition is not wide-ranging enough. As Sian Hawkins of Women’s Aid explains, ‘We can’t make these divisions any more between online and offline life. We have to make sure the bill is tackling those behaviours, otherwise there’s a huge part of domestic abuse that’s not going to be challenged through the legislation.’ For example, the current draft doesn’t address the fact that, due to data protection laws, tech companies often won’t discuss account details with anyone but the named holder, even if that person is perpetrating abuse. Katherine was not named on her account, making it very difficult to resolve the situation without her husband’s permission.
Claudia describes her experience with tech abuse as ‘the garnishes on top’ of a pattern of coercive control she had been subjected to for years. She was swept off her feet by her ‘goodlooking, charming, successful’ husband and embarked on what seemed like a dream romance. Within a year they were married, Claudia was pregnant and they had settled in the UK. But then the dynamic changed. Her story is full of textbook examples of an abusive relationship: isolation from friends and family, enforced financial dependence, extensive psychological and physical abuse. She remembers arguments about her wearing lipstick or not cleaning the house well enough: ‘Anything could set him off and he kept me up all night fighting. He would come into the room and strip the sheets off the bed or throw a glass of water in my face. ‘The next day he’d say he was sorry, but we just fell into this cycle,’ she continues. By the time she was pregnant with their second child, Claudia was suicidal. Twice she tried to leave the relationship but was persuaded to stay by his promise to have marriage counselling, or on the advice of cautious divorce lawyers, who urged her to wait to be in a stronger position financially. Eventually it was after her husband turned up late and drunk to a family holiday that Claudia felt strong enough to file for divorce. But that wasn’t the end. ‘I thought if I left, I’d be free of him,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realise the behaviour would continue during the divorce.’ The insidious nature of ‘smart’ abuse makes it especially difficult to identify, and even harder to extricate yourself from. It’s for this reason that Kez Garner set up Cyber Care, a company that provides affordable technological and emotional support to victims of cyberstalking and tech abuse, including creating reports for the police or lawyers. Garner says with this kind of abuse it’s ‘as if there is an intruder in the house even though there isn’t’. She explains: ‘We had a client whose child was given a smart TV as a present, and then found it was being used to spy on her. We even have someone who shared a Just Eat meal app with her ex and he was taunting her about what she was eating.’ One common outcome of tech abuse is that survivors then choose to opt out of digital life entirely, but Garner is determined this shouldn’t be the case. ‘It’s giving more power to the perpetrator. He’s winning. He’s making your life smaller and isolating you.’ Any home with these devices has the potential to become an unsafe environment. Lyndsey Dearlove, head of domestic violence awareness campaign UK Says No More, describes the women targeted as living ‘in a constant state of intimate terrorism’. For Katherine, it has only become clear after a year of counselling that what she thought was a secure home was far from it. The damage is long-lasting and she’s still coming to terms with what happened. ‘I know I shouldn’t blame myself but I allowed it to happen,’ she says. ‘I can’t even describe how disappointed I am in myself.’ 33
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Sian Hawkins of domestic violence charity Women’s Aid says this type of manipulative behaviour fits into the ‘gaslighting’ model of abuse. ‘It really exacerbates situations of coercion and control, making women feel like they’re trapped,’ she explains. The term originates from the 1938 play Gaslight, in which a man dims the lights in his home but tells his wife she’s imagining it, as part of a plot to convince her she’s going insane. It’s commonly used to describe psychological abuse that causes the victim to question their own reality, but smart home tech abuse more directly echoes the original source. Framed as tools of convenience, this technology allows perpetrators to weaponise a physical environment, even from a distance. As smart tech is still relatively new, there’s