Ranking Digital Rights is organizing a full day of sessions on Saturday, March 5 as part of the Internet Freedom Festival held at Las Naves in Valencia, Spain. The full schedule is available here.
If you want to learn more about how NGOs are encouraging ICT companies to respect human rights, come to our first session, “Holding Companies to Account: Advocating for Corporate Respect for Human Rights” at 10am in the Auditorium. Allon Bar and Nathalie Maréchal will join Jillian York and Sarah Myers West of OnlineCensorship.org to compare the experiences of our two projects and discuss methods to push tech companies to better respect human rights. The session will be structured as a conversation between members of each project and then a Q&A with the community.
Interested in ranking technology companies in your country? If so, come to Taller 2 (workshop 2) for “Ranking ICT companies on digital rights: A ‘how to’ guide” from 11am to 1pm on Saturday. Led by Nathalie and Allon, this interactive workshop will guide participants through the initial steps of launching a ranking similar to RDR’s Index, but on the national or local level. Interested participants are encouraged to RSVP to Nathalie (marechal [at] rankingdigitalrights [dot] org).
Do you have ideas to share? Come to Taller 2 on Saturday from 3 to 5 pm for “Ranking tech companies part 2: software, devices and networking equipment.” We are hard at work revising the methodology for the next iteration of the Index, and we need your input! In this session we invite privacy and freedom of expression experts, technical specialists, and other participants to discuss how to best incorporate companies that make and sell software, devices, and networking equipment into RDR’s methodology
Ranking such companies brings challenges such as ensuring the indicators are comparable across diverse product ranges, comprehending dense company documents,, and dealing with the fact that these types of companies may have more limited public disclosure. At the same time, it is clear that people who use of these products may suffer because of how products are configured and what operational decisions companies make. Devices and software may have access to location data or biometric information about their users, they may restrict certain types of web visits, encrypt device storage, etc. These features impact users’ rights to freedom of expression and privacy. That makes it especially important to devise an approach to benchmark software producers and device and network equipment manufacturers.
Some of the specific questions we’d like to brainstorm about include:
- what specific products should be included?
- what indicators of the 2015 Corporate Accountability Index can be used directly for these other types of companies?
- what indicators should be adapted?
- what indicators should be added?
This session is focused on ensuring that privacy and free expression issues of concern to attendees can be incorporated in the Index. Here again, we’d appreciate if interested attendees could RSVP to Nathalie (marechal [at] rankingdigitalrights [dot] org).
At least part of the team will be present for the entire Festival and we’d love to connect with you, so please reach out!
