Today, Alphabet ($GOOGL) shareholders filed a set of proposals ahead of the annual shareholder meeting this spring covering major human rights issues ranging from algorithmic transparency to data security, to disinformation.
Ranking Digital Rights is proud to have worked with Alphabet shareholders and the Investor Alliance for Human Rights to develop one of the proposals, which calls on the company to conduct a human rights impact assessment on Google’s forthcoming Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) technology. The company has billed FLoC as a privacy-respecting alternative to cookie-based tracking, which has enabled companies to collect massive volumes of personal data and use it to target ads. However, as we wrote last fall, Google’s dominant position on the data market and opacity about how it obtains and handles our data suggest that the shift to FLoC is actually intended to consolidate power over online ad targeting – not to improve user privacy.
We are also glad to see another proposal that would compel the company to stop offering dual-class shares in the sale of outstanding stock. The resolution calls on the company to ensure that future shares all have one vote per share and institute a timeframe to phase out dual-class shares. If approved, this would effectively eradicate the system that enables differential voting rights for a favored class of founders and insiders – like Larry Page and Sergey Brin – and give standard voting power to independent shareholders, many of whom are trying to hold the company accountable to the public.
“Governments and tech titans are pushing to reassert control over people’s data and content, each in their own way,” said Jan Rydzak, RDR’s Company and Investor Engagement Manager in a statement published today by the Investor Alliance for Human Rights.
“Alphabet will play a pivotal role in shaping this future landscape. Many of these proposals address areas of critical human rights risk, from falling in with authoritarian regimes to transforming how companies use personal data to target ads. Alphabet must show that it takes the risks of these endeavors seriously if it aspires to be a responsible steward of the internet.”
Read the entire statement here and Google’s filing here.
