Breakthrough donation highlights more than a decade of work on privacy and accountability, charting a path to collective renewal.
Earlier this year, as we regrouped following RDR’s transition to independence, we received a message that initially defied belief. RDR, it said, had been selected to receive the unclaimed funds from a class-action settlement (cy-près). The case – Bitmouni v. Paysafe – involved a large technology company’s alleged failure to prevent a data breach that may have exposed the sensitive personal information of nearly 100,000 people.
The outreach came as a surprise. RDR had not been a party in the case; in fact, we had never been recognized with such an award in our 13-year history. The timing, too, was extraordinary: the newly autonomous1 RDR was only starting to regain financial stability, navigating an environment that remains far more precarious for non-profits than it was a decade ago.
Massive funding cuts and unprecedented attacks by powerful actors have rocked human rights and accountability initiatives. This crisis is compounded by a spectacle of uncritical enthusiasm surrounding large language models (“AI”), which has often led to careless automation in the name of “operational efficiency” in a field where humanity and authenticity are paramount. An unstable present and fear of exploitation are the daily struggle for many non-profits, and precarity can be the prelude to collapse.
Deus ex machina moments are rare in this reality. But as we quickly learned, the outreach we’d received was genuine.
This cy-près award recognizes RDR’s long-standing efforts to help hold powerful tech companies accountable for protecting privacy as a human right. Transparency on data breaches forms a critical indicator in the RDR Index methodology. It is also a topic on which we are determined to double down as AI giants continue their quest to extract all of the knowledge, expression, and data that we as humans create.
“AI-enabled” data heists and scams have skyrocketed in the last three years, exposing poor or perfunctory security and data handling practices across dozens of industries. As human rights researcher Lucy Purdon points out, the repercussions of data breaches for companies are often purely financial, with little thought put into the corrosive business models that enable them or what true remedy may look like for the people affected.
Intensified scrutiny by independent watchdogs and security researchers is the sensible response. We will not normalize visions of an agentic apocalypse in which “rogue” AI models “break containment” and render the world inoperable. We will, however, shine an ever brighter light on the humans and entities that must ultimately answer for them.
RDR will use this award to strengthen our roots, defend privacy in new ways, and give back to the community. That means, respectively, building a strategic reserve through which we will continue to renew our mission, rolling out pilot projects with new evidence on questionable corporate privacy practices, and teaming up with people in our community through properly compensated collaborations or apprenticeships. Our partnership with the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable (ICAR) under this vision has already enabled the launch of our new assessment of telecom giants, with a lot more to come.
We are deeply grateful to M. Anderson Berry and Gregory Haroutunian of Emery Reddy, PC, John Yanchunis of Morgan & Morgan, and Ryan Maxey of The Maxey Firm, the Plaintiff’s counsel in the case, for recommending RDR as a prospective recipient of this award.2 Their well-timed endorsement of our work reaffirmed our own belief in its value and helped breathe new life into our efforts. We also extend our gratitude to Kamal Bitmouni, who brought the case on behalf of many others affected by the breach.
We disagree with the doctrine of inevitability under which universal AI data scraping and surveillance regimes are the new normal. As long as we choose to resist them, they are not inevitable. Exposing hidden networks of invasive technology enables communities to push back against tech power that never asked for consent, from Flock cameras to data centers. Privacy is very much alive, and defending it remains a worthy pathway of resistance.
- As of 2026, RDR is an independent initiative fiscally sponsored by Superbloom Design. Our partnership provides RDR with the autonomy we need to fulfill our mission while opening new avenues of collaboration with a well-respected member of the digital rights community. ↩︎
- The funds RDR received are those that remained in the settlement fund following distribution to the class members. They do not come directly from the firms representing the Plaintiff. ↩︎
