A BBC News Arabic investigation, Silicon Valley’s Online Slave Market, has found Google and Apple are enabling an illegal online slave market by approving and providing apps used for the illegal buying and selling of domestic workers in Kuwait. It also found hundreds of domestic workers for sale on popular hashtags and accounts on Facebook-owned Instagram.
Urmila Bhoola, UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery told the BBC: “If Google, Apple, Facebook, or any other company is promoting apps like these, hosting apps like these, developing apps like these, they are promoting an online slave market”.
The BBC News undercover investigation team discovered a child, Fatou*, 16 years old, being offered for sale, and evidence of international and local laws on human trafficking, modern slavery and forced labour being broken.
Fatou was put up for sale in Kuwait on the app ‘4Sale’ for $3800 – the app is available to download on both Apple App Store and Google Play. The girl was being sold alongside things like second hand cars, lawnmowers and TVs. The discovery of Fatou in Kuwait City, her rescue and journey back home to Guinea, West Africa, is at-
