A fresh study from Monash University delves into the real, ethical, and political challenges tied to using smart home tech to protect women facing intimate partner violence at home.

With one in four Aussie homes having a “smart speaker,” these always-on surveillance gadgets offer a unique chance to spot and predict things happening at home. Google’s patents and international research hint that these smart speakers could pick up sounds like screams or yelling linked to partner violence.

Big sister

The research paper lays out what today’s tech and near-future tech might do, weighing the urgency of dealing with this problem against the ethics and politics of using such technology. It looks into how these smart tools could practically spot possible violence, the obstacles for victims, and the social impact of using these systems.

The researchers caution that before we embrace the idea of using Big Sister tech to tackle partner violence, we should seriously think about the outcomes.

“Developing smart speakers to detect intimate partner violence could represent a privatization of policy responses towards intimate partner violence<” the researchers explain. “The insinuation could be that gendered violence is a problem in relationships between individuals that can be addressed in the home rather than a structural problem that reflects power relationships between the sexes in society more generally.”

Barriers to overcome

The study also highlights obstacles to using such technologies to protect women. Information technologies like smart speakers already have strong gender biases, making it less likely for women to have control over the settings of a smart speaker system.

The researchers point out instances where smart speakers are often used to reinforce the man’s power over the woman. This makes it unlikely for women to adopt these systems to protect themselves from abusive and violent partners.

In the end, the researchers suggest that relying on smart speakers alone is not a perfect solution for addressing intimate partner violence. It should go hand in hand with efforts that tackle the socio-economic structures that contribute to violence against women.

“Intimate partner violence is an urgent social and political problem, and one that existing policy measures have failed to solve. The widespread presence of smart speakers in homes offers an unprecedented opportunity to combat intimate partner violence, but also risks privatizing policy responses and reducing the political pressure on governments to tackle this urgent social and political problem,” the researchers conclude.

“If it is judged that the moral urgency of intimate partner violence justifies exploring what might be possible by developing this technology, it will be important that the voices of victim-survivors of intimate partner violence, whose interests are supposed to be served by this technology and who have have expert knowledge of relevant considerations, are heard on the matter.”