As shareholders we are concerned by Alphabet’s announced plans1 to expand data center operations in locations reported by the US State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices to present significant human rights violations.



These include Jakarta, Indonesia where opponents of the government face up to 18 months in prison for insulting the president or government officials online; Doha, Qatar where security forces interrogate social media users for tweets critical of government officials; and Delhi, India where the government frequently orders internet shutdowns and where Google’s Transparency report showed a 69% increase in government requests for user data in 2019.

Of particular concern is the plan to locate a Google Cloud Data Center in Saudi Arabia. The US State Department Country Report2 details the highly restrictive Saudi control of all internet activities and notes pervasive government surveillance, arrest, and prosecution of online activity. Human rights activists have reliably reported3 that “Saudi authorities went so far as to recruit internal Twitter employees in the US to extract personal information and spy on private communications of exiled Saudi activists.” Given this history and particularly the use of spyware to violate privacy rights of dissidents and the use of actual spies inside a similar platform (Twitter) to track US based exiled Saudi activists, the choice to locate here is particularly troubling4.

When asked by human rights activists to address these concerns, our company stated that “an independent human rights assessment was conducted for the Google Cloud Region in Saudi Arabia, and Google took steps to address matters identified as part of that review.5” While the company has declared that “Transparency is core to our commitment to respect human rights,” neither the Company’s human rights assessment for Saudi Arabia nor the resulting actions have been made public.