The report that a 22-year-old Saudi data entry male employee of a phone company in Jeddah was recently arrested after taking advantage of the access he had to confidential information of clients to make contact with various women through their WhatsApp accounts to try and have affairs with them, was yet another tale of how vulnerable we all are in this digital age.
What always amazes me is the amount of private and often indiscreet information that many people store on their computers and cellphones, and if they are teenagers, willingly post online for the whole world to see. Compromising photos, of course, are the most commonly shared item in the digital world, and the ones that come back to haunt people the most. As Darryl Hannah says in the movie “Social Nightmare” to her teenage daughter Catherine, that I watched this week on cable TV, never send out risky photos, as you never know who will send them on and on. And that is a bitter lesson Catherine learns when intimate photos of her are sent to everyone in her high school by her bitter ex-boyfriend.
Yet we are not only vulnerable to blackmail through digital means. We are also being tracked and monitored by governments and corporations. Governments want to know where we are and who we interact with for security reasons, while companies want to keep tabs on us for commercial reasons to compile our consumer likes and dislikes in order to try and sell us more things. With this in mind, it was not surprising to hear that the self-ascribed Islamic State (IS) has banned the use of all Apple products by their members, be it iPhones, iPads or Macintosh computers. The reason is because Apple keeps tracks of all of its products by building in hardware and software in all of its products that constantly send back information to it through the Internet. They claim it is needed in order to compile performance data on its various operating platforms in order to work out bugs and improve their performance. The IS says that the US government could use that data to target them in ongoing bombing raids being conducted by the Americans and their allies against the terrorist group in Syria and Iraq.
The young Saudi telecom employee was caught in a sting operation set-up by the Haia and the police after he hacked into the WhatsApp account of a married Saudi woman, who showed the messages to her husband. He informed the authorities, who set-up the operation to catch the harasser red-handed. The husband told the phone company that he was going to sue them, and shockingly the company denied any legal responsibility saying the husband should file a complaint with the Communications and Information Technology Commission! What nonsense! The CITC is a regulator, while the phone company is legally responsible for having employed the deviant man who used confidential information he had access to through his job to contact and sexually harass several women. It is the responsibility of the phone company to take all measures necessary to protect the confidentiality of their clients’ information. In this case, they clearly failed, and the CITC should punish them for that with a fine and perhaps force them to make a public apology to the wife and husband who suffered at the hands of one of their former employees.
I don’t think people should stop using digital applications to communicate with friends and family. But we should pause and think twice before sending photos to someone on WhatsApp or on Facebook. After all, once we launch information into the digital ether, we have no control how other people are going to store it, distort it and redistribute it onwards to possibly hundreds of people who were never supposed to see that photo to begin with.
— The writer is a Saudi journalist based in Brazil.
