Is Your Car Tracking You?
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 14 January 2024
⏱️ 19 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Covered in cameras, full of microphones, and always eager to use location data, our vehicles are “smartphones on wheels”—and privacy nightmares.
Guest: Kashmir Hill, technology and privacy reporter for the New York Times.
If you enjoy this show, please consider signing up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get benefits like zero ads on any Slate podcast, bonus episodes of shows like Slow Burn and Dear Prudence—and you’ll be supporting the work we do here on What Next TBD. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to help support our work.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | After nearly 10 years of marriage to a man she'd once found charming, |
| 0:10.2 | Christine Dattle couldn't take it any longer. It was September 2022 in |
| 0:14.8 | Covington, Louisiana. They gotten into a violent fight and she'd had enough. |
| 0:19.5 | She said that her husband was no longer the man that she had fallen in love with he was |
| 0:26.3 | Abusive he was narcissistic he was having an affair and so one night they had a fight, it turned violent. |
| 0:34.0 | She packed up her things, she got in her car a Mercedes C300 sedan |
| 0:39.5 | and drove five hours away to where her daughter lived. That's Kashmir Hill, who covers technology |
| 0:45.4 | and privacy for the New York Times. She spoke with Christine for a recent story. |
| 0:50.0 | After Christine fled her home, she filed a domestic abuse report with the police and broke off contact with her husband, ignoring hundreds of his texts and calls. |
| 0:59.0 | She's trying to separate herself from him and not give him any information about herself and then |
| 1:05.0 | she's driving her car and she gets this weird message that comes up about a location-based service and |
| 1:10.6 | she ignored it, it happened again, she took a photo and then when and she |
| 1:15.0 | realized it was her husband She took a photo and then when she looked it up online |
| 1:16.0 | She realized it was her husband tracking her through the car. And it was part of this service called Mercedes Me, which is an app that people can download who own Mercedes vehicles and you connect the app to your |
| 1:36.6 | car and it lets you turn on the car remotely, see where it is, let's say you forgot where you parked, you know, turn on the lights, |
| 1:45.1 | honked the horn. |
| 1:46.3 | So you can see all the conveniences of an app like this, but it was being weaponized in |
| 1:51.9 | Christine's case. A detective looked into this. There was evidence it was happening like her husband showed up one night outside of a friend's house where she was and he sent the friend a message it was a male friend he |
| 2:04.9 | sent the the guy a message with a thumbs-up emoji and she was really frightened and she felt |
| 2:10.9 | like her life might be in danger. |
| 2:13.0 | Christine contacted Mercedes, hoping the company could block her husband's access to the car's location. |
| 2:19.0 | The detective, working on Christine's case, also reached out, telling the company that Christine's |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Slate Podcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Slate Podcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.