Back in December, our friends at secure and encrypted email service Proton Mail invited Ranking Digital Rights to be a part of their 2022 Lifetime Account Fundraiser. The Proton community was asked, in November, to select which organizations they wished to see rewarded. Money was raised through a raffle in December where winners were rewarded with a Proton Lifetime account. We were honored to be chosen, alongside 10 other fantastic organizations, including allies like Access Now and Fight for the Future. And we’re so grateful: The raffle sold 68,000 tickets and raised $784,670 total, $71,800 of which will be given to RDR.
For a decade now, RDR’s rankings have been helping push companies toward greater respect for, and protection of, people’s fundamental rights to freedom of expression and privacy. Our small team and more than a dozen researchers all over the world work relentlessly each year to produce the RDR Corporate Accountability Index, which offers a comprehensive look at the commitments to human rights of the world’s most powerful tech and telecom companies
In 2022, the RDR Index comprised the inaugural Big Tech Scorecard, released in the spring, and our first scorecard dedicated to telecom companies, the Telco Giants Scorecard, released in December. This research makes public a rich array of data on company policies, giving us and our allies the power to tell compelling stories about how telecom and tech companies are meeting (or failing to meet) their human rights obligations.
As RDR enters its 10th anniversary year, we’re focused on making sure that our standards are as accessible as possible to all those who might be able to use them to yield better human rights results in the tech sector, including policymakers, investors, companies, journalists, and, of course, our civil society partners. The generosity of Proton Mail users will go a long way in helping us achieve this goal.
This includes expanding the use of our standards by local digital rights organizations around the globe, particularly in the majority world. RDR is determined to address the information asymmetries that have allowed companies to pay less attention to human rights in parts of the world that rarely dominate tech policy headlines. This lack of dedicated resources has repeatedly resulted in human rights harms, as we’ve seen recently from Kenya to Myanmar.
Last year, we helped local digital rights organizations publish new research on the effects of telcos and tech companies in Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic as well as in Cambodia, Indonesia, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, and Sri Lanka. This year, partners from Latin America to East Asia, will be releasing a total of 10 new reports using our methodology. Proton’s support will allow us to continue raising that number, bringing more local insight from those most affected by corporate behavior.
RDR’s standards and research also serve as an important touchstone for a large community of responsible investors. Over the past three years, we have recorded a number of notable achievements in this area. Our findings have directly informed a slew of recent shareholder proposals. A proposal at Meta we helped craft calling for a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model became the most successful shareholder proposal in the company’s history.
It’s only February and, RDR is already breaking new ground on upcoming proposals at Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta. But as a globally oriented human rights organization, we want to make sure that, once again, our standards are having an impact outside of the United States. Proton’s contribution will support RDR in developing ties with investors in “emerging markets” through new partnerships and collaborations. We’re also looking to expand our standards to address new technologies as they emerge. Finally, the contribution will help us bolster the use of human rights standards among ESG rating agencies, which have long been opaque about how they actually incorporate human rights criteria in their scores.
Without generous support, like that of the Proton Mail community and our other committed funders, RDR could not continue its essential work. And with that in mind, the whole RDR team wants to thank all the generous Proton Mail users who are already helping turn 2023 into a memorable year for holding the tech industry accountable for protecting our rights online.
