Centering Disability in Mitigating Harms of Bluetooth Tracking Technology 

Bluetooth location-tracking devices like Apple AirTags and Tile trackers are an increasingly popular way for people to locate their misplaced items. Unfortunately, stalkers and abusers are also misusing these devices to surreptitiously track people. Your iPhone or Android device may be able to detect AirTags that don’t belong to you and are traveling with you, but there is currently no industry-wide standard that works across mobile operating systems as well as across location-tracker brands, leaving millions of people vulnerable to high-tech stalking. Moreover, some devices have options that make them incredibly difficult to detect.  

People with disabilities are particularly vulnerable to misuse of trackers.  For example, they are more likely to experience domestic violence than other groups, which trackers can facilitate. At the same time, people with disabilities may use trackers as a form of assistive technology to their benefit. It is vital that developments within this space consider the experiences and needs of disabled people – including, but not limited to, centering accessibility in design.

New Standard in Development

Fortunately, Google and Apple—which together provide the operating systems for nearly all mobile phones—have committed to contributing to a standard to help address the misuse of Bluetooth trackers for unwanted tracking, with the support of other manufacturers of location trackers. As the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT) and the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) noted in a statement praising the announcement, the partnership between Apple and Google serves as an important step towards mitigating the misuse of these devices in intimate partner violence scenarios and other potentially harmful situations.

While a critical development, as CDT and NNEDV have previously written, detection and notification of these devices is just one part of a solution to reduce misuse. Companies, including device manufacturers, must provide meaningful and actionable information to those being tracked (not just notice) and give users choices about what kinds of alerts they want to receive. They must design user experiences that are trauma-informed— recognizing that being notified of potential tracking can be frightening or triggering— and that mitigate harms whenever possible. 

Effects on People with Disabilities

When used as intended, trackers can be helpful assistive devices for those with certain disabilities. While Bluetooth tracking devices are typically marketed as a tool for finding misplaced keys or luggage, people who are blind or low-vision can also use them to find things that they have trouble seeing. When paired with accessibility features on cell phones, for example, blind or low-vision individuals can receive voice directions to items fitted with trackers, thus helping them to find items without assistance and live more independent lives.   

Even when not used as intended – that is, for tracking individuals instead of personal property – tracking devices can be useful for people with disabilities. For example, tracking devices can be used to consensually track individuals with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or developmental disabilities. There are scenarios wherein a person may feel that having a trusted family member or caretaker track their whereabouts makes them safer or enhances their autonomy and independence. Small, Bluetooth-enabled location trackers that can fit on a keychain or be placed in jacket pockets may be less likely to be forgotten than cell phones, most of which have built-in GPS tracking capabilities. In safeguarding the autonomy of disabled people, it is important to center consent and self-determination and avoid non-consensual tracking. And, from a design perspective, ethical tech design should support only consensual tracking. When used strategically, with a focus on consent and safety, location trackers can have beneficial uses. 

Unfortunately, the misuse of these devices can also harm people in the context of intimate partner abuse, which people with disabilities already experience at disproportionately high rates. Women with disabilities, for example, are 40% more likely to experience intimate partner violence than women without disabilities. Moreover, people with disabilities in general are more likely than their non-disabled counterparts to experience stalking and psychological abuse. The vast majority of these cases go unreported, with some studies finding that between 70-85% of instances of domestic violence against disabled people generally are not reported, while around 97% of cases of domestic abuse against people with intellectual and developmental disabilities go unreported. 

There are many reasons for this. The intimate partner violence dynamic is complex in and of itself, as is the relationship between many disabled people and their partners, who may also be caretakers at least some of the time. Abusive individuals may also weaponize a persons’ disability against them to make them even more dependent – physically, financially, or otherwise – on their partners. Abusers may threaten that the person would have no other caregiver or would be hospitalized without them, which is a particularly terrifying scenario for many. In addition, parents who have a disability may be at a greater risk for losing custody of their children if judges or caseworkers assume that they are unable to care for them absent their partner. Finally, not only are disabled people more likely to experience domestic violence and abuse, but the violence that they do experience also tends to be more frequent and more severe than the violence experienced by non-disabled individuals.

Recommendations

The unique needs of disabled people should be taken into account, and centered, in all policy or industry decision-making about technological solutions towards mitigating domestic violence and stalking, including the misuse of location tracking devices. From an inclusive design perspective, this means that all hardware and software solutions should be designed with accessibility in mind, at a minimum. For example, trackers that may currently make a sound when an individual is attempting to locate them should be built with lights and haptics as well, so that people who are Deaf or hard of hearing can still locate them. These features would, of course, make it easier for all people (not just people with disabilities) to locate these devices in all circumstances (not just in cases of misuse). In addition to hardware changes, any software-based solution should be compatible with existing accessibility settings. There should be asynchronous notifications that confirm these settings have not been changed (i.e., your phone should remind you of your settings unprompted) to ensure that users are able to receive notifications that they are being tracked, if desired, and to ensure that an abusive partner or caregiver has not changed those notifications without the user’s consent or knowledge. 

Rolling out accessible features and making them commonplace as soon as possible will help people with disabilities, as the abusive partners likely are familiar with the barriers and the technology they rely on, and could continue using the non-accessible version(s) of tracking devices to prevent detection—until those versions become more difficult to source. This, of course, would be faster and easier with software updates than hardware solutions – but the speed and breadth of the rollout in general should be considered, regardless. Rates of domestic violence have increased around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began. At the same time, in the United States, legal protections for victims of stalking have effectively been weakened by the Supreme Court under the guise of protecting free speech. These developments underline the urgency of using technology and tech policy solutions to address intimate partner violence and stalking – and that those solutions have to consider everyone who may be particularly vulnerable, including people with disabilities.