Amnesty International said it has joined with 38 other human rights groups and individuals to call on Google to halt plans to establish a Cloud Region in Saudi Arabia until the company can publicly demonstrate how it will mitigate risks of adverse human rights impacts. In a statement, the human rights group said Saudi Arabia has a dismal human rights record, including digital surveillance of dissidents, and is an unsafe country to host the Google Cloud Platform.
According to Access Now, Google told concerned groups that it had conducted an independent human rights assessment of its future cloud region and taken steps to address issues it had identified. The company is yet to share what those issues were or what it did.
Google initially announced it was making Saudi Arabia one of its new Cloud Regions in 2020, with plans to build cloud infrastructure and partner with Saudi Aramco, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, to resell enterprise cloud services. The announcement sparked a response from activists groups particularly because Google’s original blog post included a quote from Snap, the creators of Snapchat, promoting the business, Protocols reports. The quote has since been removed.
