Your Phone Is Being Used to Control You
She didn't know the app was on her phone.
She found out because he showed up. Again. At the coffee shop she'd only told her sister about. The restaurant she'd booked that morning. The friend's house she hadn't mentioned to anyone else. He had a gift, she thought. For finding her. It took three more months before she understood it wasn't a gift. It was software.
This is what coercive control looks like in 2026. Not chains. An app running in the background.
The Technology Was Built for This
Tech-facilitated coercive control is the use of smartphones, smart home devices, and digital accounts to monitor, isolate, and restrict an intimate partner. Researchers at University College London, tracking cases across the UK, found it present in the overwhelming majority of domestic abuse cases they reviewed. Not a subset. The majority.
The tools being weaponized are not purpose-built surveillance products in most cases. They're the same features marketed as safety and convenience: location sharing on Find My iPhone. Shared Google accounts where someone else controls the password. Smart speakers that log voice commands. Vehicle GPS systems that report location history. Stalkerware — commercial apps that hide their presence and transmit location, messages, and call logs to a remote device — is a category that has grown substantially in recent years, but even without it, the attack surface is enormous.
Leonie Tanczer, who leads the Gender and IoT Research Group at UCL, has documented how internet-of-things devices in the home create an additional layer of control infrastructure: smart locks that only one person can override, smart thermostats controlled remotely as a form of environmental punishment, baby monitors accessed as surveillance tools. The smart home is, for some people, a surveillance architecture installed in their own house.
What the Research Says About What Comes Next
A 2026 analysis of intimate partner violence cases — drawing on law enforcement records and survivor interviews — found that tech-facilitated monitoring reliably precedes physical violence escalation. The digital control comes first. It establishes the pattern. The abuser knows they can monitor without consequence. The surveillance becomes normalized — to both parties. Then the control extends.
The progression matters because it means the phone tracking isn't an accessory to the abuse. It's often the first act. The relationship has already entered a stage of coercive control by the time the monitoring is discovered, and the discovery itself can be a trigger for escalation — because the abuser's sense of control is suddenly threatened.
This is the part that gets missed in how we talk about privacy and safety in tech. Location sharing is framed as a choice, a convenience, something you opt into. In coercive relationships, opting in was never a free choice. The "shared" account was created under pressure. The location sharing was "requested" in a context where refusal had consequences. The technology doesn't know the difference between consensual sharing and coerced sharing. It just shares.
Two Systems That Keep Missing Each Other
Domestic violence services and technology companies have been operating in parallel for the last decade, and they're finally beginning to collide.
Survivor advocates have been documenting stalkerware and device abuse for years. Apple's implementation of tracking notifications in iOS 14 — which alerts users when an AirTag is following them — was a direct response to documented stalking cases. Android has moved toward similar protections. Some domestic violence organizations now provide digital safety assessments as part of their intake process, helping survivors identify compromised accounts and devices before they leave a situation where leaving safely is the critical operational window.
But the gap remains large. Most platforms don't distinguish between voluntary and coerced account sharing. Most tech support training doesn't include questions about intimate partner surveillance. Most survivors don't know what to look for, because the monitoring was designed to be invisible.
The steps that matter most are specific. Screenshot and back up evidence before removing monitoring access — because the removal itself can be seen as aggression. Change passwords from a device the abuser doesn't have physical access to. Tell one person outside the situation exactly what's happening before making any changes. Contact a domestic violence organization's tech safety line before doing anything else — organizations like the Safety Net program at the National Network to End Domestic Violence have advisors who know how these systems work.
The Control Was Never About the Technology
Here's the reframe that matters.
The stalkerware is not the coercive control. The location access is not the coercive control. These are tools. The coercive control is a pattern of behavior that exists in the relationship regardless of the technology — the technology just makes it more efficient and more invisible.
Which means the solution is not primarily technological. A survivor can factory-reset their phone, change every account credential, and leave. The abuser can find other methods. The research on coercive control consistently shows that the technology removal, without accompanying safety planning and often legal protection, reduces one vector while the underlying dynamic finds others.
What tech-facilitated coercive control reveals is the degree to which our devices have been designed for a model of individual use that doesn't reflect how they're actually experienced in controlling relationships. The safety assumptions baked into consent prompts and shared accounts presume that consent is freely given and can be freely revoked. In coercive relationships, neither is true.
The phone didn't trap her. But for a long time, it helped someone else do exactly that.
Photo by Sora Shimazaki via Pexels
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