Saudi Arabia's government housing platform has introduced a feature that allows residents to contact any neighbor within their building using nothing more than a map and a building number — no name, no phone number, no prior introduction required. The tool, called Seventh Neighbor, was quietly launched inside the Sakani app operated by the Ministry of Municipalities and Housing, and its arrival has generated genuine public enthusiasm at a moment when urban Saudis are navigating the social consequences of rapid modernisation.The feature works through two core functions. Residents can invite neighbors to an event — entering a name, description, and date, then selecting recipients by their position on a building map — or send seasonal greetings, such as Ramadan congratulations, Eid messages, or graduation acknowledgements. Critically, the identities of recipients are never revealed to the sender. What appears on screen is a map with building numbers rather than names or personal information, a design choice the Ministry frames explicitly as a privacy protection. When a message is sent, the sender may also choose to remain anonymous, operating under a chosen nickname rather than their registered identity.The platform's own promotional material frames the use case with a touch of self-deprecating humour: "Instead of meeting your neighbor through a delivery mistake... we will help you in a better way." The line lands because it is accurate. In the dense apartment blocks that now characterise Riyadh, Jeddah, and the Kingdom's expanding secondary cities, the delivery courier has become one of the few social interfaces between households that might otherwise remain invisible to one another for years.The Islamic framing of the feature is not incidental — it is the editorial foundation of the initiative. The Sakani announcement explicitly invokes the Prophet's teachings on the rights and obligations of neighbors, a doctrinal tradition that runs deep in Saudi religious and social life. The concept of the seventh neighbor in Islamic jurisprudence refers to the extended circle of neighbors to whom obligations of courtesy, care, and mutual support apply — not merely the person next door, but those sharing a building or street. By encoding this tradition into a government app, the Ministry is not simply solving a logistical problem. It is asserting that Saudi Arabia's digital transformation and its religious heritage are not in tension but can be mutually reinforcing.That assertion sits at the heart of Vision 2030's civil society dimension, an aspect of the reform programme that receives less international attention than its headline economic targets. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's transformation agenda has focused most media coverage on megaprojects — NEOM, the Red Sea tourism corridor, the entertainment sector liberalisation — but the quality-of-life pillar of Vision 2030 is equally ambitious. It includes explicit commitments to strengthen neighbourhood cohesion, expand community participation, and use digital infrastructure to reconnect citizens to the social fabric of their immediate environments. The Seventh Neighbor feature reads, in this context, as a concrete, human-scale implementation of that broader aspiration.The privacy architecture of the feature deserves scrutiny alongside its stated purposes. The Sakani platform is a government-operated system, administered by a ministry with access to the housing and residency data that underpins the building-number mapping. While the anonymity design protects users from one another — neighbors cannot identify who sent a greeting unless the sender volunteers that information — the platform operator necessarily holds the underlying data that makes the system function. The Ministry has not published detailed documentation of what data is retained, for how long, or under what circumstances it could be accessed by security agencies. For a feature explicitly designed to encourage social contact between previously unconnected individuals, the question of backend data governance is not marginal.This is not a novel tension. Digital community platforms in every jurisdiction involve some degree of trade-off between social utility and data sovereignty. In Saudi Arabia, where the state's relationship with civil society remains more directive than in most liberal democracies, that trade-off carries additional weight. Citizens using Seventh Neighbor to invite a neighbor to a gathering or send a Ramadan greeting are, at the same time, generating a social graph that sits on government servers.That complexity should not obscure the genuine social need the feature addresses. The urbanisation of Saudi Arabia has been extraordinarily rapid. A generation ago, the Kingdom was still substantially a society of extended families in closely networked communities. Today, a significant proportion of its population lives in high-rise apartment developments in cities that have grown faster than the social institutions capable of knitting their residents together. The phenomenon — urban anonymity, the erosion of neighborly obligation, the replacement of face-to-face community with mediated digital interaction — is global. The Sakani app's response is to use the same digital medium to try to reverse the isolation it has helped create.In the Kingdom, as across transforming societies, ambitious modernisation requires navigating tradition, geopolitics, and economic reality. The Seventh Neighbor feature is a modest intervention — an app function, not a policy framework — but its careful design, its explicit grounding in Islamic social ethics, and its attempt to solve a human problem generated by rapid urban growth make it a revealing case study in how Saudi Arabia is trying to manage the social costs of transformation from within its own cultural vocabulary.