Keeping tabs? There's an app for that

For the past week everyone’s been holding their breath for a Blackberry ban that never came to pass.

But while everyone was wondering if BBM would be cut off in Saudi Arabia and which countries might follow suit, the Saudi government was quietly introducing another mobile phone feature: 
Text message alerts to notify men when their female charges leave the country alone.

Read the full article here. Excerpts below:

Gender segregation has spawned a culture of excessive telecommunication. Bluetooth usage (to exchange details between men and women anonymously) on phones was commonplace in Saudi Arabia before mobile owners in the West had any use for the tool. In a country of early adopters and super-users, people usually have more than one mobile phone to separate friends, family and professional contacts. Before pay-as-you go arrived on the scene, my female friends sometimes had their chauffeurs procure more mobile phone numbers in their own names so that the bill would not be sent to their father's home address.

It is not clear exactly what the Saudi authorities are hoping to achieve or pre-empt with this new measure, since if a woman has gone past immigration at the airport that means that she has already been signed off by her guardian and all her paperwork was in order. In addition, if one is to imagine that the guardian may have since changed his mind or was co-opted or tricked into giving permission, the text message allegedly contains no information about the woman's destination – only that she has left.

Article: Keeping Saudi women tagged by text