The Digital Surveillance And Blacklisting Of Women

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Of all the advantages that our computers and smartphones bring us, who would have imagined that these devices can be used to survey us? And I am not talking about the NSA or MI6, but rather thieves online seeking to use ransomware to unsettle our lives while cashing in the misery of the person whose personal information is being held, hostage.

In February, Apple and Google were put under intense public pressure to remove an app hosted on their platforms. Absher, an app launched in 2015 by the Saudi Arabian government, tracks the whereabouts of women allowing men to “control” the women whose guardianship they handle. Absher enables men to log the names and document identification numbers (eg. passports) of “their” women, thus setting up a profile for how many journies they are allowed to make, how long they may travel, what medical procedures they are allowed to undertake—if at all. Over the past two months, many have stepped up to defend this app as Egyptian-American writer, Mona Eltahawy, initially condemned it only to turn around and her followers to consider a response by a Saudi woman who wrote that Absher is a “symptom of a problem, not the problem itself.” Still, such an app can be both: a symptom of a larger cultural problem and still be a problem in itself, since the app literally tracks females.

A digital extension of Saudi’s historic and cultural tradition which keeps women under the control of men, this app allows for big tech to cash in on what is nothing other than an anti-democratic process. The defenders of this app claim that Absher is the portal to the government information site where Saudi citizens conduct all sorts of official business, from the registration of driving licenses to the application for passports. Still, it is the platform that allows women to be surveilled and controlled while being hosted by two of the largest tech companies in the world. As Saudi researcher for Amnesty International, Dana Ahmed, described Absher to Time magazine, it is “another example of how the Saudi Arabian government has produced tools to limit women’s freedoms.” Imagine the agony of men who don’t know where “their women” are.

In February, U.S. Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat from Oregon, drafted a letter to these Apple and Google, asking them to “take immediate action to prevent your technical infrastructure, including your app stores, from being used by the Saudi government to enable the abhorrent surveillance and control of women.” Since Wyden’s letter, both tech giants have been called out for their having hosted such an app on their platforms for many years and the questions go far beyond this one incident. After weeks of critique, Google announced last month that it will continue to host Absher but just this past week, sisters Maha and Wafa al-Subaei who fled Saudi Arabia for Georgia, have renewed calls for Absher to be pulled from the platforms of both tech companies.

While both Google and Apple have claimed to be on the side of the freedom of expression, both companies have been criticized for maintaining a double standard. Last year, Google confirmed that it had been developing a censored version of its search engine under the codename “Dragonfly” since early 2017. Dragonfly is merely the Google search engine which has incorporated the Chinese government’s blacklisted queries which filters out all the websites blocked by China’s Internet censors, also known as the Great Firewall. The list of censored sites is not insignificant as it includes major western media—from Wikipedia, pro-democracy virtual spaces to financial sites. Dragonfly also extends to Google’s other functions such as image search, spell check, and the suggested search features.  Similarly, last year Apple complied with the Chinese government’s requirement to store the cryptographic keys which are used to unlock iCloud accounts within China instead of the United States. This move means that any law enforcement agency which wishes to access user information would now bypass the US legal system entirely, meaning that the virtual freedoms and protections that Apple’s users in China previously had are now gone.

More recently, it has come to light that Google is hosting Shinigami Eyes, an app that blacklists the social media accounts of females, marking them in red as a means to publicly humiliate and marginalize these women from social media. This plugin, which many have branded as the electronic extension of men’s rights activists, treads dangerously into the protections guaranteed under UK and EU privacy laws and it is creating, in parallel to Saudi Arabia’s Absher, another tier of surveillance of females by males.

We must be cautious of how new technology is dangerously creating regressive cultural norms that are backed up by tech giants eager to make a profit no matter the cost to human rights.

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