12 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
of Saudi Arabia makes no secret of his
desire to transform his country. Since
he began consolidating power in 2015,
he has marketed himself to domestic
and international audiences as a force
of modernity, touting an agenda of
cultural liberalization and economic
reform. In 2016, he outlined his would-
be revolution with the release of
“Saudi Vision 2030,” an ambitious plan
to establish Saudi Arabia as a “global
investment powerhouse” and “a gate-
way to the world.”
The development of a “sophisticated
digital infrastructure” is at the heart of
Prince Mohammed’s vision. And while
many of his proposals remain unreal-
ized — loftily promised futuristic cities
have yet to materialize — the crown
prince’s obsession with technology has
wrought some significant changes. He
has overhauled numerous state agen-
cies from the top down, establishing
“e-government solutions” for services
like court fees, charitable donations,
health care and travel records. The
slew of new e-portals are overseen by
the newly created National Digitiza-
tion Unit, a centralizing agency tasked
with being a “disrupter” of the status
quo and an “incubator” for a modern
information society.
The shift toward
“e-government” has
brought welcome
efficiency to Saudi
Arabia’s sluggish
public sector. The
government boasts
that Meras, an inter-
face for starting
businesses, has cut
the wait time for
some financial serv-
ices from 81 days to 24 hours, while the
Ministry of Interior’s app Absher gives
citizens access to 130 government
procedures from their phones. With a
population that is largely young
(roughly 70 percent of Saudis are
under 35) and tech-savvy (there are
approximately 1.4 cellphones for every
resident), Saudi Arabia is primed for
such digitization. According to the
government’s own data, Absher alone
logged over 20 million transactions
between mid-2015 and August 2018.
When using these apps, Saudis
make a familiar trade-off: swapping
access to their personal information
and devices in exchange for conven-
ience. But unlike, say, a customer of
Amazon, a Saudi citizen often has little
choice. Certain government fees, for
example, are now payable only online,
according to a Saudi journalist.
At a time when the Saudi govern-
ment has grown increasingly repres-
sive toward dissent — and increasingly
willing to use technology to censor its
citizens — the government-sponsored
digitization could have grave implica-
tions for the rights of the Saudi people.
For now, plenty of Saudis remain
enamored of the convenience of e-
services. “A lot of these new apps have
really made life a lot easier,” a young
Saudi professional in Riyadh recently
told me. (He refused to be identified
for this article, citing worries he couldbe targeted by the state for speaking
to foreign media.) “For the most part,
people are really happy about it, and I
haven’t heard many of them asking
questions about privacy.” He noted
that the apps and online portals large-
ly eliminated longstanding systems of
bribery and favoritism.
At the same time, the Saudi govern-
ment is expanding its data-collection
and surveillance capabilities in less
visible, and less voluntary, ways. In
recent years, the country has installed
thousands of cameras and monitoring
devices along sidewalks and roads,
expanded the use of biometrics for
citizens and travelers alike, and intro-duced a “Smart Hajj” program to
manage — and track — millions of
annual pilgrims. It has also deployed
American intelligence software to
surveil its citizens and purchased
millions of dollars’ worth of British-
made “telecommunications intercep-
tion equipment.” (It has also been
accused, along with neighboring
United Arab Emirates, of employing
Israeli spyware to target the personal
devices of Saudi civilians.)
These reforms have come alongside
a sweeping set of crackdowns, also
directed by the crown prince, to si-
lence activists, dissidents and intellec-
tuals across the political spectrum. Inthe past three years alone, Saudi au-
thorities have arrested or detained
hundreds of citizens, from the women’s
rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul to
religious moderates like Salman al-
Awda, who currently faces the death
penalty. The journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, who was killed in the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul in October 2018,
had fled the country the year before to
escape this suppression.
In this crackdown, the Saudi state
has relied heavily on 21st-century
technology. Though Mr. Khashoggi’s
death was, by all accounts, a medieval
slaughter, there is evidence that the
Saudi government used advancedspyware to track him long before the
act. Since his killing, numerous reports
have indicated that his former col-
leagues and fellow activists have been
subjected to similar efforts.
One of these targets is Iyad al-Bagh-
dadi, who worked with Mr. Khashoggi
on projects promoting a free Arab
press and now lives in Norway. Mr.
Baghdadi, an online activist and a
computer programmer by training,
says the Saudi government’s digitiza-
tion efforts reveal dangerous trends:
“Generally, people like to say that
technology is agnostic, neither ‘good’
nor ‘bad, but if you zoom out, you’ll seeROBERT BEATTYMohammed
bin Salman
says he
wants to
bring his
country into
the 21st
century.
What does
that mean
for Saudis’
privacy?
Sarah AzizaThe Saudi crown prince’s digital iron fist
In a sweeping
set of crack-
downs, the
Saudi state
has relied
heavily on
21st-century
technology.A ZIZA, PAGE 14On Thursday, Facebook announced the
start-up in the United States of Face-
book Dating, a product that allows users
to search for love all without the hassle
of leaving the app where your angry
uncle continues to share recycled
memes about “Crooked Hillary.”
The feature was first announced in
2018 and is up and running in 20 coun-
tries as of Thursday.
Most companies would consider it
poor timing to roll out a feature offering
to manage the love lives of its users the
day after reports of a large data breach.
But in defense of Facebook — which is
constantly resetting its “Days Without
an Embarrassing Privacy Failure”
counter — there’s almost never a good
time.
Yes, you absolutely deserve a lifetime
of love and happiness, and yes, there’s a
decent argument to be made that Face-
book knows more about you than any
rival dating service ever could. But
even if Facebook has the kind of weap-
ons-grade algorithms that might move
fast and break your dry spell, trusting
the company with your love life feels
like a disaster waiting to happen.
This may seem uncharitable. After
all, the company is framing Facebook
Dating as altruism. “Right now it’s a
really feel-good mission. It’s just con-
necting people,” Nathan Sharp, one of
Facebook’s product managers, told
reporters on Thursday. “There are noplans for ads and no plans for subscrip-
tions.”
No ads.
No revenue.
Just love.
What’s in it for Facebook? The cyni-
cal observer might notice that Dating,
apart from “just connecting people,” is
also a clever backdoor for Facebook to
do some mingling of its own. Specifi-
cally, to help merge and integrate its
legacy product with Instagram, which it
acquired in 2012. Unlike Facebook
proper, the dating app lets users import
Instagram photos and (soon) Insta-
gram Stories into their profiles. The
feature will also allow daters to add
their Instagram followers to a widget
called “Secret Crush,” which will notify
you if your crush alsoadds you to his or
her crush list.
Dating apps are home to some of the
most sensitive personal information we
choose to disclose (locations, interests,
pictures, career history and all of our
tastes and personal preferences). It
adds up. In 2017, a French journalist
used European Union privacy laws to
request her Tinder data and received
800 pages of what she described as “a
trip into my hopes, fears, sexual prefer-
ences and deepest secrets.” Which is
another way of saying that this is infor-
mation you want protected at all costs.
Plenty of legacy dating apps aren’t
much better with privacy and security.
But protecting your romantic secrets is
a job that Facebook seems, given its
history of data breaches, uniquely
unqualified for. Sensing this, the com-
pany wrote a blog post assuring users
that dating profiles would be mostlyseparate from traditional Facebook
profiles (only the user’s first name and
age will automatically populate in a
dating profile; the rest need to be added
by the user) and that information will be
secure and opt-in. “Not everyone on
Facebook is interested in dating, which
is why we made Facebook Dating a
separate, opt-in experience,” the blog
post reads. “That means we won’t
create a Facebook Dating profile for
your account unless you specifically
choose to create one.”
How charitable!
Those assurances are no match forthe company’s recent history. Since
2017, Facebook has come under fire for:
■Wednesday’s report from
TechCrunch of an “exposed server” that
“contained more than 419 million
records over several databases on users
across geographies, including 133 mil-
lion records on U.S.-based Facebook
users, 18 million records of users in the
U.K., and another with more than 50
million records on users in Vietnam.”
■A security flaw that potentially
exposed the public and private photos
of as many as 6.8 million users on its
platform to developers.■A different bug that exposed up to
30 million users’ personal information
last September.
■An admission that the company
“unintentionally uploaded” the email
contacts of 1.5 million new Facebook
users since May 2016.
■The Cambridge Analytica scandal,
where data from tens of millions of
users was misappropriated and shared
for profiling for political campaigns
(but, sure, trust it to keep your secret
crush).
The voter profiling resulted in a
record $5 billion fine from the Federal
Trade Commission. Would you trust
your dating profile, history and all of its
attendant personal data to a company
that the F.T.C. chairman noted in July
had “failed to live up to its commit-
ments” to “establish a reasonable pro-
gram to protect privacy” over the last
seven years?
Many people will! After all, billions of
people still log into Facebook and de-
posit personal information despite its
regular privacy failures. But that does-
n’t mean it’s a good idea. And for those
who are fed up with Facebook but just
can’t seem to quit it, abstinence from
using its dating feature is a tiny, yet
satisfying way to protest the brazen
platform.
But don’t take my word for it. Face-
book’s chief executive, Mark Zucker-
berg, said it best last year in bold font
newspaper ads. “We have a responsibil-
ity to protect your information,” he
wrote. “If we can’t, we don’t deserve it.”Happiness,
brought to
you by the
company that
gave you the
Cambridge
Analytica
Scandal™!
Don’t trust Facebook with your love life
DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGESCHARLIE WARZELcovers technology,
media, politics and online extremism.Charlie Warzel
Writer at LargeOpinion