An application allowing Saudi men to monitor their wives

Apple and Google are accused of helping to "enforce apartheid" in Saudi Arabia by offering an app on their platforms that allows men to track women and prevent them from leaving the country.

Absher is available on Google Play and iTunes Store. It is an application developed by the Saudi government that allows men to specify when and how women can cross Saudi borders – and will alert them even if they do.

Activists and refugees felt that the trips presented by Absher were "a major factor in the persistent difficulty of women leaving Saudi Arabia.

The iTunes and Google Play stores are hosting a free app called Absher, run by the Saudi government that tracks women and prevents them from leaving the country.

The Absher application is run by the Saudi government and has been downloaded more than a million times until now.

The app allows tutors to indicate where women can go, for how long and at which airports they are allowed to go.

Alerts are triggered if a woman leaves a given area. This is one of the main reasons why women have trouble fleeing Saudi Arabia and are often caught.

Absher advises male guards and fleeing women can be apprehended while remaining intact, while fleeing women can still be apprehended.

On another page, the guardian can easily see which permissions are active and modify them if necessary.

Absher allows men in Saudi Arabia to monitor and control women's whereabouts

Under Saudi law, every woman has a legal "guardian" who can restrict her movements to specific airports and routes and receive alerts as soon as they cross borders.

Yasmine Mohammed, a former Muslim activist who campaigns and writes about women's rights, said that there was a tragedy in the way Apple and Google were facilitating "archaic misogyny".

"How ironic. In the West, these technologies are used to improve lives and in Saudi Arabia, they are used to impose gender apartheid.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have expressed concern about the application downloaded more than a million times on Google and Apple stores.

"Apple and Google have rules against apps that facilitate threats and harbadment. Apps like this can facilitate human rights violations, including discrimination against women, "Rothna Begum, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch, told The Insider.

"To determine whether an application should be allowed, application store vendors should consider the broader context of the purpose of the application, how it is used in practice and whether it facilitates or not serious violations. In particular, companies should take a closer look at government-run applications. "

"Even if the application has a more general purpose, the government could simply remove the monitoring feature from the guardianship of the application and continue to offer the rest of the feature."

Similarly, Dana Ahmed, Amnesty International's researcher for Saudi Arabia, also condemned the application by stating that "SMS alerts were another example of how the Saudi government has put tools to limit women's freedoms.

"The tracing of women in this way restricts their movement and once again highlights the worrying system of discrimination provided for by guardianship laws."

The human rights organization has asked Apple and Google to agree that the application be used to harm women and to require changes for it to happen. do not happen again.

Apple and Google have not commented yet.