Forgot your house keys? No problem, you have a code. Want to save energy and still come home to a nice cool house on a hot day? Lower the blinds at your office desk and turn on the A/C before you start your commute. Dying to know if that special package you’ve been waiting for arrived? Check your Ring camera while you’re out, thank the delivery person in real time, and tell them exactly where to leave it. Allergies bothering you? Just say the word, and a robot vacuum will handle the dust bunnies and cat hair. You can relax on vacation, knowing an app will alert you to a leaky sprinkler or other suspicious activity at your house. Smart home devices can also provide detailed insights into your energy use that help you save money.
Horowitz Research’s most recent State of Media, Entertainment, and Tech: Subscriptions 2026 survey found that about 40% of U.S. consumers have adopted smart home devices. Doorbells, cameras, and locks were the most commonly used devices (55%), followed by smart TVs (44%) and sound systems (42%).
Some estimates are even higher. Another recent study found that today, “For the first time in history, more than half of all American households — 77 million homes — actively use at least one smart home device.”
“Notably, half of smart homeowners say they could not go back to life without their smart devices,” Horowitz found.
But there is a dark side to all these convenient connected devices and smart-home technologies: they can become tools of an abuser.
Back in 2018, The New York Times broke a story of how these devices – then still quite new, but expanding rapidly – were being used to watch, stalk, frighten, intimidate, gaslight, and confuse victims of domestic violence and abuse. Even after the abuser was out of the home.
“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.”
At the time, the Times said these experiences were frequently aggravated by a lack of knowledge – on the part of both victims and emergency responders – about how the devices worked. The victims – frequently women – interviewed for the story talked about music suddenly blasting or the home temperature being turned way up or down, lights mysteriously going on and off. Others said their abusers kept changing the codes on home locks or ringing the doorbell remotely. The study also found that, commonly, one partner, most often male, set up the smart home systems and was the admin on the accounts.
People working domestic violence help lines told the Times they’d seen a sharp increase over the previous year of callers who said they’d “[lost] 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.”
Experts cautioned that simply getting rid of the device wasn’t enough to protect victims, and it sometimes made things worse. Conflict or violence may escalate if the abuser finds a system has been disabled or uninstalled.
For some victims, the remote harassment, monitoring, and manipulation got so bad they suffered serious mental health consequences, including requiring psychiatric holds.
Even before the explosion of smart home technology, a 2014 survey by the National Network to End Domestic Violence revealed that a startling 97% of victim services said they serve clients experiencing technology-enabled abuses.
This year, SB 50 – Victim Digital Safety Act went into effect in California. Championed by Senate Majority Leader Angelique Ashby (D-Sacramento), the bill passed without opposition, and Governor Newsom signed it into law. The new legislation helps protect victims of domestic violence and harassment from tech-based abuses, and helps ensure that California law keeps pace with technology and the evolving ways it can be used to cause harm in such cases. SB50:
- Mandates that companies quickly cut off an abuser’s access to devices and accounts shared with the victim – the abuser’s ability to remotely control such devices must be severed within two business days.
- “Expands the scope of harassment covered under restraining orders to include digital harassment through connected devices and online accounts.”
Survivors of “domestic violence, dating violence, stalking, sexual assault, human trafficking, and related crimes” can submit a device protection request to an account manager (vendor, service provider) themselves or through a designated representative, including “verification that the perpetrator has committed or allegedly committed a covered act against the survivor or an individual in the survivor’s care.”
The law also states that the account manager must not notify the perpetrator of access changes, and must keep the protection request and any information relating to the survivor’s account, data, and so on confidential, disposing of it within 90 days.
The new law helps define and clarify technology-based abuses, and gives victims a pathway to quickly curtail the type of monitoring, manipulation, bullying, and harmful control that smart-home systems provide in the wrong hands. But SB50 is not an end in itself; it works alongside the traditional Domestic Violence Restraining Order (DVRO) process.
If you are experiencing domestic abuse, your safety is the top priority. Resources are available: National Domestic Violence Hotline. Speak with a knowledgeable family law attorney as soon as possible about next steps. The experienced family law attorneys at SFLG have been helping clients navigate high-conflict divorce and domestic violence cases in California’s technology epicenter for four decades.
By Debra Schoenberg
