On May 10, Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) team members Lisa Gutermuth and Ilana Ullman presented findings of the 2017 Corporate Accountability Index at Re:publica, an annual conference on technology and society held in Berlin.
In their session, the RDR team reviewed Index research which found that the world’s major internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies lack disclosure of policies affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. To illustrate this, they discussed this year’s research showing that companies failed to disclose enough about how they handle user information, and also did not clearly disclose policies for responding to data breaches, for which only three out of the 22 companies evaluated received any credit. The RDR team also explained how differences in scores between both Russian companies and both Chinese companies illustrated areas in which there is some degree of choice in policy disclosure despite the restrictive legal environment. They also presented several of the Index’s recommendations for companies and for governments.
Several RDR partners and researchers also presented their work at the event. Vladan Joler and Djordje Krivokapic of the SHARE Foundation presented their work on mapping Facebook’s algorithm, Gisela Pérez de Acha of Derechos Digitales presented on the “Right to be Forgotten” in Latin America, and Tanya Lokot, a lecturer at Dublin City University, facilitated a meetup on digital storytelling.
More than 9,000 participants attended Re:publica 2017, according to event organizers.
You can view the full presentation here.
