I have known a few victims of domestic abuse in my life and none of these women were able to sever links to their abusers successfully. There were children involved and lack of financial resources to strike out on their own. That is not counting how the cycle of abuse tears a person's self-confidence to smithereens.
They view the world through different eyes and nothing is easy or unassociated with fear. The idea of not having logs of phone calls and text messages made by the victim of abuse is a great one but it should be much wider than just crisis hotlines and the like. Even calls to a neighbor or a friend can trigger violence from the abuser - their goal is to isolate them so any signs to the contrary is problematic.
A person should be able to go to their phone company's website and register themselves as a victim of abuse and determine exactly how much visibility they want their abuser to have into their phone records. That will be a great first step in empowerment - gaining control of what the abuser sees and knows about them. This allows the victim to plan an orderly escape, gather the resources needed to pull it off. Turning off the ability to track the phone should be part of the solution too.
The reason things will likely fall apart as some of the commentors on the Ars article have pointed out, is the opportunity this opens up for abuse. A person pretend to be a victim of abuse and do a lot of shady things and now have a way to evade detection. To prevent that the system will require hard evidence of abuse and that will limit the number of victims who can actually get the help they need
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