Internet tax protest, Hungary 2014. Photo by Amy Brouillette, RDR
This is the RADAR, Ranking Digital Rights’ bi-monthly newsletter. This edition was sent on February 10, 2021. Subscribe here to get The RADAR by email.
The 2020 RDR Index is almost here!
Who topped the charts? Who tanked? How did newcomers Amazon and Alibaba match up against the world’s other leading digital platforms? Has anything improved over the last five years? And what happens when you ask Big Tech companies to tell you how their algorithms work? (Spoiler alert: Not much.)
In the coming days, our team will put the finishing touches on the 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index! Our latest human rights-based ranking of the world’s most powerful tech and telecom companies (and a snazzy new website) will go live on February 24.
We hope you’ll join us for our public launch! At this virtual event hosted by New America, RDR’s Jessica Dheere and 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:
With these leading voices in our field, we’ll talk about how policymakers, advocates, and investors can use RDR data to hold tech and telecom companies accountable for protecting users’ rights in 2021.
The scan: What we’re reading
Tech is having a reckoning. Tech investors? Not so much via Technology Review
“…a real reckoning among VCs would require a reorientation of how Silicon Valley thinks, and right now it is still focused on ‘one, and only one, metric that matters, and that’s financial return.’” Read at technologyreview.com
Kudos to our friends at Mozilla for launching the 2020 Internet Health Report!
A healthier internet is possible. In its fourth year, Mozilla’s Internet Health Report reflects on major events of 2020 through the lenses of racial justice and labor rights and asserts that meaningful transparency must be the first step towards platform accountability.
Final pings: Where to find us
Join us for a first look at the 2020 RDR Index!
February 24 at 11:00 EST/16:00 GMT | Register here
Webinar: Investor Alliance for Human Rights and RDR
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.
Social Dilemma virtual tour
February 25 at 13:00 EST/18:00 GMT | Register here
Join the Social Dilemma virtual tour with RDR’s own Jessica Dheere, and other speakers including Safiya Noble and Rasha Abdul-Rahim, for a discussion examining how a human rights lens can help us begin to imagine the way forward and hold these platforms accountable.
London protest. Photo by G. Miessi, licensed for reuse (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
This is the RADAR, Ranking Digital Rights’ bi-monthly newsletter. This edition was sent on December 10, 2020. Subscribe here to get The RADAR by email.
In 2020, we’re marking International Human Rights Day by looking back on a very special protest chant. It went like this: “Fuck the algorithm! Fuck the algorithm!”
Last August, this was the refrain among students and parents gathered outside the U.K. Department for Education in London to voice their anger over a government decision to issue end-of-year secondary school grades using an algorithm, after students were unable to sit for final exams due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When Ofqual, the government department that regulates qualifications and exams in England, published the data behind the algorithm, it was plain to see that it carried a bias against high-performing students at schools with historically lower test scores, thereby reducing these students’ prospects for university admission.
This loud and certain public response, and its keen focus on the algorithm itself, signals an inflection point in public awareness of the potential harms of technologies that try to predict who we are and what we want. Digital rights advocates, technologists, and researchers are no longer the only people who understand the problems that arise when our rights are determined (or denied) by technologies that are built without basic measures of accountability to the public. The people most affected by these technologies have raised their voices in 2020, and they have been heard.
While students in the U.K shouted “fuck the algorithm,” Black Lives Matter protesters in the U.S. demanded that local governments suspend their use of facial recognition technologies—including software built by two companies we rank, Amazon and Microsoft. Although researchers showed compelling evidence in 2019 that Amazon’s Rekognition software wrongly identified women and people with dark skin at alarmingly high rates, it wasn’t until this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests that Amazon, alongside Microsoft and IBM, vowed to stop selling this software to law enforcement, at least temporarily. And despite the specter of COVID-19, people around the world are wary of contact-tracing apps, in many cases deciding that their privacy rights are not worth trading for the unproven promises of these move-fast solutions.
As we look back at big wins and losses for human rights in 2020, this feels like something to celebrate. Tech companies can no longer operate without worrying about how their actions will be judged by the public. The barriers that have guarded against public scrutiny of new technologies seem to be crumbling.
In our work at RDR, we see evidence of this in several places. Facebook’s long-awaited Oversight Board finally launched and the group announced its first set of cases for review just last week. A few days later, Twitter posted an open call for comments on its process for assigning “verified” status to high-profile users—we tweeted a few thoughts on this. And two leading companies in the RDR Index, MTN and Yandex, released transparency reports for the very first time.
Transparency graphic by Access Now, licensed for reuse (CC BY 4.0)
‘Tis the season for transparency?
South African telco MTN’s report came on the heels of an open letter to new CEO Ralph Mupita, written by Access Now and signed by allies including RDR, pushing for the company to adopt stronger human rights practices. In a blog post for Access Now, Isedua Oribhabor and Berhan Taye called the report a milestone, but pointed to many more steps MTN can take to truly champion transparency.
Russian tech giant Yandex also released its first transparency report in late October. RDRʼs company engagement lead, Jan Rydzak, acknowledged the move, but said the company still has a long way to go to better safeguard and respect users’ human rights
Apple responded to our open letter!
Apple’s global head of privacy, Jane Horvath, responded to our call for the company to implement critical privacy protections and also took an unprecedented swipe at Facebook’s ad-targeting practices. In our October letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, signed by several partners, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, we urged Apple to implement long-awaited anti-tracking measures initially promised as part of iOS 14 and later delayed to 2021. As noted in our letter, this move left many users vulnerable to surveillance and harmful disinformation during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and in the critical weeks leading up to the 2020 U.S. election.
In her response, Horvath offered a detailed breakdown of the different layers of privacy and data collection that can occur in the mobile ecosystem and acknowledged that “tracking can be invasive and even creepy.” She also took Facebook executives to task, saying that they “have made clear that their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users…”
This letter is a big win for the RDR team as we continue to push companies including both Apple and Facebook to be accountable to users across the globe and uphold the universal right to privacy. Read more about our letter and Apple’s response in the Guardian, Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg, and Fast Company.
COMING SOON: THE 2020 RDR INDEX!
Mark your calendar: The next RDR Corporate Accountability Index will launch on February 24, 2021! For the first time, we’ll be ranking companies on what they say publicly about how they build and use algorithms and ad-targeting systems. And we’ll be adding two new companies to our roster, Amazon and Alibaba. Read more about the forthcoming RDR Index
Evaluating Iranian chat apps with RDR’s methodology
Our rankings inform research and advocacy all around the world and our methodology is public—so anyone can use it! At a virtual event last month, our colleagues at Taraaz and Filterwatch used our methodology to analyze popular local messaging apps in Iran and evaluate their companies’ commitments to privacy and freedom of expression. At a recent virtual event hosted by Small Media, RDR Research Analyst Afef Abrougui and RDR Director Jessica Dheere discussed the findings with lead researchers Roya Pakzad and Melody Kazemi along with Kaveh Azarhoosh and UC Irvine’s David Kaye.
Learn about our other partnerships, or reach out to info@rankingdigitalrights.org if you’d like to talk with us about using our methodology!
Watch: Replay of Digital Rights & Technology Sector Accountability in Iran hosted by Filterwatch and Taraaz.
Pings: RDR events and activities in brief
Global Conference for Media Freedom: RDR Director Jessica Dheere moderated a star-studded panel, including Estonian Foreign Affairs Minister Urmas Reinsalu, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of expression and opinion Irene Khan, Folha de S. Paulo journalist Patrícia Campos Mello, Internet Sans Frontieres’ Julie Owono, BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman, and Facebook’s Miranda Sissons. Watch the replay.
Bread and Net 2020nline: RDR Research Analyst Afef Abrougui spoke with Wafaa Heikal on how digital rights organizations in the Arab region can keep large tech companies—namely Etisalat and Ooredoo, both of which we evaluate—accountable to their users.
IGF 2020: RDR Editorial Director Ellery Biddle kicked off RDRʼs participation in the IGF with a session of the Dynamic Coalition on the Sustainability of Journalism and News Media, presenting key findings from our It’s the Business Model report series. Later in the program, RDR researchers Afef Abrougui and Jan Rydzak co-led a very 2020 session on how companies respond to crisis.
The Scan: What we’re reading (and buying)
From the RDR team, we wish you a restful and safe end of 2020! You’ll find us back in your inbox on February 18 with a sneak peek at our 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index. Until then, keep an eye on our latest ideas and activities on Twitter
Put us on your radar! Subscribe to The RADAR to receive our newsletter by email.
Photo by Petr Kratochvil (CC0)
With rampant fears of digital disinformation about the U.S. presidential election and COVID-19 making the rounds, U.S. lawmakers from both parties are seeking to restrict the targeting of political ads online. Legislators like Anna Eshoo, Josh Hawley, and David Cicilline are pushing bills that would tackle ad targeting on platforms like Facebook and YouTube.
We know these and other companies’ algorithms feed users the most attention-getting content, even when it is misleading, hateful, or otherwise harmful to human rights—our spring 2020 report series, It’s the Business Model, looks at this in depth. But by focusing mainly on digital platforms, legislators let a very important player off the hook: U.S. telecommunications companies.
Telecommunications companies (telcos) like AT&T (ranked by RDR), Sprint, Comcast, and Verizon* offer customers different combinations of voice, text, broadband, and cable TV service. This means that they also have the ability to collect and combine customers’ data from multiple streams.
If I subscribe to a bundle of services from AT&T, the company can collect, combine, and correlate data from my internet browsing history, my TV-watching habits, and the infinite riches of my mobile phone activity and location data. On top of all this, AT&aT has my home address and billing information—valuable pieces of data that suggest a lot about what demographic groups I belong to.
Telcos’ access to demographic data allows them to bring a unique level of precision to their calculations about customers’ interests. In the digital advertising world, this information doesn’t just benefit telcos—it can benefit a whole ecosystem of actors (including advertising companies, ad networks, and digital platforms themselves) who want to target specific groups of people with specific interests.
In the 2020 RDR Corporate Accountability Index (due out in February 2021), we will rank digital platforms and telcos on a new set of indicators measuring corporate policies and practices around targeted ads. We apply these indicators to every company we rank that engages in or enables any type of ad targeting, and to every company that shares or sells user data and insights to third parties for any type of advertising or sponsored content.
In our last post, we explained why we decided to apply these standards to both digital platforms and telcos. Here, we’ll get into some of the ways telcos are claiming a piece of the targeted advertising pie.
Selling ads on cable TV
Telcos have long used demographic data to entice advertisers. On cable TV, while television networks claim most of the advertising slots, providers (like Comcast) get a few minutes of ad time per hour as well. Since the 1980s, cable providers have been able to increase the price they charge advertisers for those meager slots by geographically targeting the ads by postal code.
Today, mirroring the techniques of digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube, some telcos are beginning to let advertisers target cable ads on a much more granular level. Telcos are taking into account what they know about each household, based on data they collect from people’s internet behavior, mobile activity, and TV-watching habits. Telcos then target ads accordingly. This means that even if my neighbor and I are both watching Trevor Noah’s show on Comedy Central, we may see different ads during the commercial breaks.
Cable companies Comcast, Charter, and Cox have a partnership called Ampersand under which they synthesize user data in order to target TV ads. They added significant new ad-targeting capabilities—including letting advertisers target on the level of individual households instead of zip code—in time for the ad spending period leading up to the presidential election. For viewers, new systems like this are making the cable TV ad experience feel closer to what happens online. We’re seeing fewer ads for things we’d never buy, but having more of that uncanny feeling of being followed by advertisers who seem to know a lot about our interests.
While there are stronger transparency requirements for ads on television, targeted advertising on cable still could exacerbate the same problems that it has inflamed on social media: misinformation, polarization, and further fracturing of the public sphere.
Selling demographic data for the online targeted-advertising ecosystem
Telcos also sell user data to other players in the targeted-ad market when this proves more profitable than simply using it in-house. While some telcos sell user data outright (as T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T were caught doing with location data in the U.S.) others, like Verizon, sell “insights” based on user data. The “first party data” in telcos’ coffers can include mobile users’ location data and internet browsing history.
However, for online advertisers, the most important data from telcos is often their mundane but exceptionally accurate demographic data.
Precise demographic data, such as postal code and income level, adds an incredibly potent ingredient to the digital profiles that are used to target consumers, and can thus compound the very real problems that targeted advertising creates. While advertising companies may be able to target a political ad at certain users based on their online behaviors, they can do this much more precisely when they have users’ demographic data on hand.
Online advertisers and digital platforms often cannot directly access accurate and precise demographic data about users. This means that telcos are providing the industry with the much-needed “truth set” that demographic data represents. When combined with other data collected from data brokers and internet companies surveilling users’ online behavior, the “truth set” provided by telcos can anchor and enhance the value of data collected and inferred by these other actors. As such, telcos are helping online platforms increase their already unprecedented concentration of information and the power that comes with it.
To give an example, I live in a densely populated area of Washington, D.C. Before COVID came along, I either rode my bike or took the Metro to work every day. My mobile provider, AT&T, could probably glean these patterns by combining my location data (which would reveal my frequent Metro rides), my browsing behavior (indicative of my age and interests, like bike-riding), and my address. This would explain why, on the web, I’m less likely to see car ads, and more likely to see ads for Lyft or a local bikeshare. Most TV-based ads are still targeted nationally, by zip code. But when telcos can’t do the targeting themselves, they are more than happy to sell user data to the online advertisers who can take the final leap to targeting specific individuals as they browse the web.
It doesn’t end there. Many telcos also plug their data into parts of the internet-based targeted advertising “stack,” as AT&T has done with its Xandr advertising subsidiary. But, as our research has shown, telcos are hesitant to clearly describe these activities to the public, making it difficult to hold them accountable for these practices.
In European Union countries, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides some privacy protection not just against Google and Facebook’s use of data, but against that of telcos as well. But the United States is still struggling to pass such a law.
Convergence…towards what?
This correlation of personal data collected by telcos and digital advertising companies as customers use different services leads to what people in advertising call “convergence”—the ability of an advertiser to use all these data streams to capture audiences “across screens.”
The involvement of telcos is a key driver of this convergence because it brings otherwise inaccessible demographic data streams into the targeted-ad world. When it comes to political campaigns, these systems can enable candidates to ensure that voters see the same messages—misleading and hateful ones included—on every device they own, no matter what services they are using.
We’ve begun evaluating telecommunications’ companies targeted-advertising policies because we worry that the targeted-ad practices of telcos are no less harmful than those used by digital platforms like Google and Facebook.
As the movement to constrain targeted advertising gains momentum, advocates must look more critically at the role that telcos play in this milieu. Wherever it emerges, it is the targeting-advertising business model, more than anything inherent about social media in particular, that is driving many of the problems in our public sphere and that could undermine the integrity of next week’s elections in the U.S.
*Ranking Digital Rights evaluates Verizon Media, which owns Yahoo! Mail and Tumblr. We do not evaluate Verizon’s telecommunications services.
