Our new 2020 RDR Index website. Dive in!
This is the RADAR, Ranking Digital Rights’ newsletter. This special edition was sent on February 24, 2021. Subscribe here to get The RADAR by email.
The 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index is LIVE. Today, we are proud to present our latest research and a dynamic new website to you, our dedicated RADAR readers.
Our findings are sobering. Amazon ranked dead last. Twitter took the top spot, but only by a hair. Only two companies surpassed 50 out of 100 percentage points.
In 2020, we saw improvements by a majority of companies and found noteworthy examples of good practice. But these things were overshadowed by findings demonstrating that the global internet is facing a systemic crisis of transparency and accountability.
Dive into the 2020 RDR Index
TODAY: Learn all about it at our virtual launch event at 11:00 AM EST
RDR Director Jessica Dheere and RDR Founding Director Rebecca MacKinnon will show highlights and key insights from our new body of research, and then open up a conversation with an all-star panel, including:
- Nabiha Syed, President, The Markup
- Marta Tellado, President and CEO, Consumer Reports
- Marina Madale, General Manager: Sustainability and shared value, MTN
With these leading voices in our field, we’ll talk about how policymakers, advocates, and investors can use RDR data to hold companies accountable to the public!
Top takeaway from 2020:
Companies are improving in principle, but failing in practice
The most striking takeaway from our research in 2020 is just how little companies across the board are willing to publicly disclose about how they shape and moderate digital content, enforce their rules, collect and use our data, and build and deploy the underlying algorithms that shape our world. Across the globe, companies are leaving users in the dark about how their personal information is collected, protected, and used to drive profits.
On our fifth RDR Index—and in a year when so much was at stake—these results are chilling. Companies failed to make the kind of substantive changes required to better protect human rights, despite having a clear road map for doing so.
In her introduction to the 2020 RDR Index, RDR Director Jessica Dheere writes:
We know that without the tech services and platforms we rank, alongside hundreds of others, the pandemic would be even lonelier, less productive, and more difficult to endure. But, we have to ask, at what cost? Without more transparency from the companies, we cannot calculate it. If people and lawmakers do not know the specifics of how they operate, it is much harder to hold them accountable for their negative effects through smart regulation and other measures. We risk losing their benefits as we try to mitigate their harms.
Fortunately, as companies have amassed more power and profits over the past decade, global civil society, including RDR, also has been hard at work, building the political and social capital needed to bring debates about the role of tech companies from the fringes to the mainstream.
If tech companies do not want to tell the world how they work, how they profit, and how they will factor the public interest into their bottom line, we will force their hand.
Read more on the 2020 RDR Index website
TODAY: 2020 RDR Index launch event
February 24 at 11:00 EST/16:00 GMT
Watch here
TOMORROW: Webinar with RDR and the Investor Alliance for Human Rights
February 25 at 11:00 EST/16:00 GMT
Register here
Join the Investor Alliance for Human Rights and RDR for an exclusive webinar where RDR researchers will discuss key findings from the 2020 RDR Index and then join a panel discussion with Lauren Compere of Boston Common Asset Management and Carlo Drauth of Telefónica.
TOMORROW: Rebecca MacKinnon at the World Affairs Council of Kentucky
Register here
February 25, 2021 5:30 PM EST
Join RDR Founding Director Rebecca MacKinnon for this discussion on digital rights and privacy in the age of disinformation, moderated by Alisia McClain, Director of Community and Education Initiatives at Microsoft Future of Work Initiative.
