Al-Elm, an information security company based in Riyadh, is providing Saudi citizens with the ability to sign up for real time SMS text message updates should their foreign workers attempt to escape or formally change their occupation with Saudi authorities. Saudis can sign up for the text message notification service through their bank.

Eman Al-Nafjan, a Saudi woman blogger who first wrote about the Al-Elm services, doubted the text messages would be helpful in preventing foreign workers from running away.

“If they run away you have to register that you don’t know where they are anymore,” she told The Media Line. “This is just a notification of that registration, so in a way this is information that a person already knows.”

“If you bring someone in, you’re responsible for them — for where they live, their electricity, everything,” Al-Nafjan explained. “They have to do everything through their sponsor, so if they are caught doing something wrong their sponsor is going to be called.”

“I don’t like the word escape and I definitely think the sponsorship system is abusive,” she said. “But at the same time we have a lot of gangs, prostitution and criminal gangs of runaways, you can’t expect foreigners to come in and expect equal rights or human rights when Saudi women are not treated with those rights.”

Al-Elm’s text message notifications services came to light last month, when women’s rights activist Wajiha Al-Huwaidar revealed Al-Elm was providing a text message service to Saudi men to inform them should any dependent leave the country.

Under Saudi Arabia’s guardianship system, all women are legally registered as the dependent of a male relative, be it their husband, father, brother or son.

“It’s not just women who are insulted by this service,” Hannah Draper, a Turkish blogger temporarily living in Saudi Arabia, wrote on a blog focusing on Saudi women’s issues. “Just below the notification of dependents leaving the country is ‘registration of sponsored worker escape’ and the cancellation thereof. Can’t let our maids run away, can we?”

Like most Gulf states, Saudi Arabia’s economy has become highly dependent on foreign workers, principally in manual, domestic, clerical and service positions. There are an estimated seven to eight million foreign workers in the country, the majority from Asian or Arab countries, making up some 30 percent of the population. About 85 percent of foreign workers in the country are engaged in low-skilled labor.

Foreign workers typically enter Saudi Arabia on a work visa sponsored by a local individual or company, which is then responsible for renewing the sponsored worker’s visa and residency permit. Rights groups say this sponsorship system makes foreign workers overly dependent on their employers, who can use their power over the workers through exploitation and abuse.

A businessman in Saudi Arabia, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the use of text messages to monitor foreign workers in real time would make life much more difficult for workers who find themselves in abusive or vulnerable situations.

“It does make life more difficult for the absconding worker,” he told The Media Line. “In the case of larger employers, it’s hard to keep track of all your sponsored workers and it’s possible that people’s status has changed without the sponsor knowing. So if, for example, a worker is in a remote site and decided he doesn’t want to be there anymore for whatever reason and takes off, before it may take his sponsor a long time before he found out that his worker had run away. Now it will be much quicker.”

“The nature of the system is inherently unfair to foreign workers,” he continued. “The way the rules in this country work, when you come into the country for employment, you are sponsored by your employer, whether your employer is a proprietorship company or an individual family like you are a driver or a domestic worker.”

But Ahmed Egal, an expatriate businessman in Saudi Arabia and the CEO of AOST Inc, argued that the text message notification system should be seen against the backdrop of positive government steps to digitize its bureaucracy.

“This is not anything ominous in any way,” he told The Media Line.

“The digitization of government doesn’t change the nature of the system, it just makes it easier and facilitates access to information. So in my view this is a very positive step because it expands the level of e-government which actually makes life much easier for businessmen like myself.”

“Now I can go into the immigration department to check the status of all my legal documentation in the country — for example when my residence permit is expiring,” said the Somali native.

“A lot of these routine things used to have to be done by going down to line up at various government offices, which would take over a week. Now you can do almost all your paperwork online, so these kind of e-government initiatives have made the whole nightmare a lot easier for expatriates and Saudis alike.”

Egal argued that e-government has actually improved conditions for foreign workers.

“From a monitoring point of view, foreign workers were always monitored anyway,” he said.

“But even drivers, domestic workers and laborers, usually know someone who has access to the Internet, so e-government actually liberates them from being dependent on their sponsor to know their status in the country.”

Al-Elm and Saudi officials did not respond to requests to comment on this article.