New research from the eSafety Commission shows that a quarter of Australians think it's acceptable to have access to their partner's passwords and device codes. This has raised concerns among domestic violence experts, with eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant warning that sharing passwords can lead to coercive control.
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00:00This is really to raise awareness about technology-facilitated abuse as a form, of course, of control.
00:09So, yes, of course, in relationships, we may agree to share information, including pass
00:14codes, which we generally wouldn't recommend.
00:17But the point is here is that, in domestic and family violence situations, technology-facilitated
00:23violence is almost ubiquitous.
00:26And this extends the abuse through surveillance, harassment and tracking.
00:32And this is—these are the attitudes that we're concerned about today, that one in
00:36four Australians think that they should be given pass codes, that one in eight Australians
00:44think that they should be able to track their partners and the like.
00:50There's a difference between privacy and consent, and then trying to tether your partner
00:55to an intimate relationship through technology, rather than doing this as a cooperative thing.
01:02We take reports from the general public for image-based abuse, which is the nonconsensual
01:07sharing of intimate images, but also serious adult cyber abuse.
01:10And a lot of these reports are from women who are in domestic and family violence situations
01:15and that are experiencing a lot of harassment, stalking and doxing.
01:21So, this is where your technology can be used as a weapon against you, rather than as a
01:26tool or a lifeline.
01:28And sometimes it's decidedly low-tech.
01:30It's 500 harassing text messages in a day.
01:34It's aggressive microtransactions in banking deposits.
01:40It can be drones over safe houses or cars actually stalling a kilometer beyond the family
01:46home.
01:48Technology is ubiquitous, and this is what makes coercive control using technology feel
01:53isolating but also all-encompassing.