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Technology giants Google and Apple have been criticized for hosting a controversial smartphone app that allows Saudis to control how and where women travel and prevent them from leaving the country without permission.
Developed by the Saudi government, Absher has been around for a while, but it started making waves in Western media after an article in ThisIsInsider highlighted one of its most controversial features: allowing male "tutors" to track and restrict women's movements via their smartphone.
In Saudi Arabia, women are placed under the authority of a guardian regardless of their age. Women must ask permission from their guardians to get married, open bank accounts and go to certain places. With Absher, it's easier than ever to track and restrict women's travel options.
Photo: Absher
With the help of the application, tutors can register dependent women, grant and cancel travel privileges, as well as list certain destinations by means of a few taps on the touch screen. Whenever a dependent woman deviates from his or her travel profile or tries to cross the border through a customs office, the guardian receives an alert via Absher, allowing him to take the measures that are required before leave the country illegally. Before applications became part of our daily lives, Saudi women had to present a signed yellow form every time they traveled abroad without being accompanied by their guardians, which was easier to create, but as Absher works in real time, it is much more difficult to get around. In fact, the service run by the government is considered one of the main reasons why women are arrested trying to leave the country.
To be fair, Absher has some really useful features, such as allowing users to easily pay fines online, but its tracking method has been criticized as a tool to limit women's freedoms. Now Google and Apple are facing hostile reactions for hosting the service on their app stores.
"We call on these companies to badess the risk of human rights violations and to limit the damage that these applications could have for women," Amnesty International's Dana Ahmed, Amnesty International's researcher for Saudi Arabia, told Amnesty International. This is another example of how the Saudi government has developed tools to limit women's freedoms. Monitoring women in this way restricts their movement and once again highlights the alarming system of discrimination provided for by guardianship laws. "
"The most technologically advanced platforms, Apple and Google, have created a tragedy that facilitates the most archaic misogyny. What irony! In the West, these technologies are used to improve lives and in Saudi Arabia, they are used to impose gender apartheid, "added former Muslim activist Yasmine Mohammed.
Photo: Absher /ThisIsInsider
Apple Store does not offer data on the number of downloads of an app, but on Google Play, Absher has been downloaded over a million times and displays a rating of 4.6 out of 5 Google and Apple declined to comment. the situation Absher until now.
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