Saudi Arabia’s futuristic new city could be ‘scary’ surveillance state

 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s in-the-works Saudi Arabian megadevelopment is being touted as a futuristic paradise — but tech privacy pundits are concerned for the rights of residents.

Known as Neom, the $1 trillion city is a pet project of the prince and is set to feature an artificial ski resort, robots and AI for the project’s inhabitants, and two 1,600-foot-high buildings running parallel to each other across a 75-mile strip of desert and mountains, as The Post previously reported. 

There will be 10 regions, including a zero-carbon area called the Line where AI will use 90% of inhabitants’ data to personalize services — far more than the approximately 10% of resident data used in current smart cities, Insider reported.

“Neom is designed to leapfrog those [other smart cities], to begin from the ground up in sort of an entirely designed fashion to collect data and use that data for the purposes of the city,” James Shires, a researcher at London’s Chatham House think tank, told the publication. 

This has a concerning amount of potential to mutate into less of a science fiction dreamscape than a metropolis at the mercy of state surveillance, warned Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager for the digital rights organization Access Now. 

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Privacy experts are concerned for residents’ safety.

NEOM/AFP via Getty Images

Neom will be on the Gulf of Aqaba, slightly east of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

NEOM/AFP via Getty Images

The futuristic megacity will feature two massive, mirror-encased skyscrapers that extend into the desert.

NEOM/AFP via Getty Images

A handout picture provided by Saudi’s Neom on July 26, 2022 shows the design plan for the 1,600-foot-tall parallel structures, known collectively as the Line, in the heart of the Red Sea megacity Neom.

NEOM/AFP via Getty Images

Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister, Mohammed bin Salman.

VIA REUTERS

Although Neom and other cities like it are being marketed as “smart” or “eco cities,” they’re actually “surveillance cities” because “essentially they’re built on an architecture that is fueled by people’s personal data, and in a country like Saudi Arabia where there is no data protection or safeguards, no oversight, no accountability, no transparency, no separations of powers, and the fact that [Mohammed bin Salman] is actually ruling the security agencies,” Fatafta told Insider, adding “It is a scary idea.”

China is playing a major role in distributing surveillance technology, so as to enable the creation of such cities — part of the nation’s leader Xi Jinping’s larger plan to “normalize and seek to legitimize its vision of a state-led cyberspace and surveilled public,” Harvard University fellow Bulelani Jili commented to Insider.

It would appear that the Saudi Prince — whose ties with Jinping have recently grown stronger — is eager to assist in realizing this vision on a grand scale.

Construction on Neom is reportedly moving along quickly, and 9 million people are currently slated to live there by 2045

https://nypost.com/2023/04/25/saudi-arabias-neom-could-be-scary-surveillance-state/