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from the my-thermostat-is-holding-me-hostage dept.
In more than 30 interviews with The New York Times, domestic abuse victims, their lawyers, shelter workers and emergency responders described how the technology was becoming an alarming new tool. Abusers - using apps on their smartphones, which are connected to the internet-enabled devices - would remotely control everyday objects in the home, sometimes to watch and listen, other times to scare or show power. Even after a partner had left the home, the devices often stayed and continued to be used to intimidate and confuse.
Connected home devices have increasingly cropped up in domestic abuse cases over the past year, according to those working with victims of domestic violence. Those at help lines said more people were calling in the last 12 months about losing control of Wi-Fi-enabled doors, speakers, thermostats, lights and cameras. Lawyers also said they were wrangling with how to add language to restraining orders to cover smart home technology.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday June 26 2018, @03:45PM (1 child)
If someone is separating from an abuser, you want them to sever every link possible.
If they choose to go back, that's up to them, but they need to be able to choose without interference from the abuser.
That means that the abuser shouldn't have that control.
However, trying to get the abuser to pay for it is going to be impossible. Getting the victim to pay isn't exactly fair but they are the ones that require the work and money spent on them. Having the courts pay to retain X10, etc. experts just to do this for people is ludicrous and places a burden on them to find and secure EVERY POSSIBLE DEVICE which is just untenable, especially in the era of cloud-connected things run from China.
The wording of the law needs to be GENERAL. It needs to cover all possible ways to contact the victim, or to harass them. Making a SPECIFIC law is stupid, except as a clarification of a gray area. It's not a gray area that an abuser tweaking the lights of a house he doesn't live in any more by court order, but where his victim does, is harassment. This is without any doubt whatsoever. And no law will STOP an abuser doing this.
It presents a new and interesting problem, but not entirely dissimilar to "John was the one who handled the car paperwork", "I don't know how to turn on the boiler", etc. that abuse victims (or even any person separating from someone they were dependent on) already experience.
It does raise the possibility, however, or "abuse-over-Internet"... literally confining your partner to a premise, or to do tasks, or to stay inside the house and be watched, etc. because you can see what they are doing at all times. That's surely a worry for anyone who's ever heard an abuse victim's story.
However, I would feel personally that if you were abused staying in the house that the perpetrator did so much work in / on / knows where it is that is the real problem. That's not to say that abuse victims should suffer forced moves, but they are doing themselves no favours continuing to keep those ties and dependencies around, technological or not.
There is no easy solution. But the legislation should already be in place, if any lawyer involved in drafting it had a brain at all.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 27 2018, @12:21AM
True. I'd expect a good anti-abuse restraining order to include general language that would prevent 'side-channel' abuse like the aforementioned remote controlling of physical systems in proximity of the victim. But, also to avoid actions that are 'deemed harassing' that might not have proximity of the abuser or a remote system. I assume it would cover things like: mailing the victim a box with a dead horse head in it, calling all their friends and telling them stories about the victim, publicly releasing previously obtained compromising (or abusively captioned) images/videos, mail ordering a box of peanuts and having it delivered to someone with a peanut allergy, etc, etc.
All of these things are generally abusive and don't require the abuser to even be in the some county as the victim. Having singular stipulations like 'within X hundred metres' of the victim is pretty stupid, because it only assume physical proximity and direct physical abuse. In reality, psychological abuse can happen without the abuser having any direct communication or contact with the victim, especially if they are good at manipulating third parties (or systems in this case) to do their dirty work for them.