A look at Saudi Arabia's Kollona Amn app, launched in 2017 to let its citizens inform on activists, as the country expands the use of surveillance technology
eying off a neighbour's lovely farmland? Report them to the Inquisition and grab the land. #news https://www.businessinsider.com/ ... Leticia Rodríguez / @letirgar : Saudi snitching app turns citizens into social media police. Welcome to 1984 2.0. Just insane. https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/ ... Eric Lundberg / @ericblundberg : Who creates these apps? The creator has responsibility to highlight security faults with their apps used for these terrible practices by authoritarian-leaning governments. Shame on Saudi Arabia for relying on Kollona Amn — those agencies should be prohibited from using it. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Kollona Amn, launched in 2017, outsources monitoring to the monitored: citizens report activists through the app, extending a surveillance apparatus that has already run through other channels. The kingdom previously put an app in US stores that let men track women's travel via Absher, and whistleblower data later showed location tracking of citizens abroad by exploiting flaws in the SS7 phone protocol.
What makes this installment notable is the division of labor: network exploits and commercial spyware do the covert work, while Kollona Amn makes reporting a civic act. Critics quoted in the piece, including developer Eric Lundberg, press the accountability question onto the people who build such apps — the same pressure that got Apple and Google to act on Absher and on the Saudi-backed anonymous-commenting app Sarahah.
First-order effects
- Activists inside Saudi Arabia face a reporting channel embedded in everyday smartphone use, lowering the cost for the state of identifying dissent without deploying its own operatives.
- Apple and Google again face the gatekeeper question they met with Absher and Sarahah: whether apps built for state surveillance belong in their stores.
Second-order effects
- App-store policy becomes a lever of foreign policy — removal decisions like those around Absher and Sarahah set precedents that other governments' surveillance tools will be measured against.
- Developers and platforms supplying capabilities to authoritarian-leaning states inherit reputational and legal exposure, pushing due-diligence questions up the supply chain toward whoever builds and distributes these tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, surveillance states converge on a layered model — citizen reporting apps, network-protocol exploitation, and commercial spyware — where each layer covers the others' weaknesses and no single takedown disables the system.
- The durable fight shifts from any one app to distribution chokepoints: whoever controls app stores and telecom infrastructure becomes the de facto regulator of state surveillance reach.
The trend: States are assembling surveillance from consumer infrastructure itself — citizen-reporting apps layered over network exploits and commercial spyware — making platform gatekeepers and protocol owners the new checkpoints.