Google’s data plans in Saudi will risk lives

NEW YORK: Saudi Arabia doesn’t exactly have a positive track record when it comes to digital espionage.

In 2018, the country’s government reportedly used the notorious spy software Pegasus on devices belonging to the family of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident who was killed that year in a gruesome assassination allegedly orchestrated by the government.

In 2019, two former Saudi employees of Twitter in the US were charged with using the popular social media platform to unmask critics of the Saudi government.

And last year, a Saudi aid worker who had used a Twitter account to make jokes about his government was jailed for 20 years. His case is believed to be connected to the government’s infiltration of Twitter.

And then there’s Google. The online giant has the most popular search engine and most-used, web-based email service in the world. Part of US company Alphabet Inc., Google boasts about how carefully it protects users’ data.

But it has also had some noteworthy run-ins with authoritarian leaders. When the company first introduced its search engine to the Chinese market in 2006, it was criticized by activists for censoring search results critical of the Chinese government.

Then between 2009 and 2010, Google was targeted by “a far-­reaching hacking attack known as Operation Aurora that targeted everything from Google’s intellectual property to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” science publication MIT Technology Review reported. Google then withdrew from the Chinese market.

Despite that, it was only in 2019 that the US company publicly confirmed it had abandoned a secret project codenamed Dragonfly, a search engine created especially for China, that would filter out results about human rights, democracy, religion and political protest.

Now Google says it wants to set up a “cloud region” in Saudi Arabia. Given the two actors involved, the reaction from human rights organizations and digital privacy advocates was not surprising.

“This disturbing new step by Google raises … fears that this cloud center could leverage more power to the government of Saudi Arabia in further facilitating human rights abuses,” said a 2021 letter signed by 31 human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, the Oxford Internet Institute, and Human Rights Watch.

“A cloud center in Saudi Arabia will risk lives,” Laura Okkonen of Access Now, the online rights organization that has been a prime mover behind the campaign, told DW.

Most recently, a group of activists supported by Access Now filed a resolution so that Google’s investors could vote on the Saudi controversy at the annual general meeting of Google’s parent company Alphabet, which was held on June 1.

The proposal asked that Google “commission a report assessing the siting of Google cloud data centers in countries of significant human rights concern.” Although just over 57% of independent shareholders at the meeting voted for the resolution to be adopted earlier this month, Google’s executive management outrank them in voting power and the resolution was rejected.

When responding to DW’s inquiries, Google did not directly address the topic; the company sent an online link to its blog post from December 2021 announcing the Saudi Arabian data center in Dammam would be going ahead. The political issues around setting up a data center in Saudi Arabia are clear.

Björn Scheuermann, a research director at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society said, “The government says these servers are on our territory and subject to our legal system. In an authoritarian system, defense against legal orders quickly reaches its limits, when your physical assets are in the state’s territory.”

That’s a problem in Saudi Arabia, Marwa Fatafta, policy manager for the Middle East at Access Now, told DW, because “Saudi Arabia’s internet regulation laws are hazy and ripe for exploitation.”