Georgetown Law
Technology Review

The doorbell rings, but no one is there. The temperature in the home goes from extremely cold to extremely hot without anyone touching the thermostat. Locks change when no one is home or unlock without warning in the middle of the night. The refrigerator is mysteriously turned off, leaving all the food inside to spoil. Lights flicker on and off while music blares and people try to sleep. While these vignettes may seem like scenes from a horror movie, they are the lived experiences of survivors of Smart HOme facilitated Tech-abuse (SHOT).1I will be using SHOT throughout this paper to refer to any abusive actions using smart home devices. I take this term from the paper “Are Smart Home Devices Abandoning IPV Victims.” Ahmed Alshehri et al., Are Smart Home Devices Abandoning IPV Victims, arXiv, Aug. 15, 2020, 1, 2. In that paper, Alshehri and other scholars provide an analytical framework to distinguish SHOT from other types of tech facilitated abuse. Id. at 2.

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