RDR is now an independent initiative. Our website is catching up.  Read our announcement →

Donate

23 Oct

Posted at 08:38h in Announcements, Featured, News by
0 Likes
RDR and Access Now pushed tech companies to adopt one human rights recommendation each. Here’s how they responded.

Ellery Biddle

India’s Jammu and Kashmir region has seen 55 internet shutdowns so far in 2019. These shutdowns, often triggered by conflict on the ground, have left residents unable to communicate, access information, exchange money or do any other activity that the internet enables. While shutdowns happen at the behest of the Indian government, it is up to companies like Bharti Airtel—a dominant internet and mobile service provider in India—to actually cut off services.

This might lead Kashmiris to wonder: What exactly happens when Bharti Airtel receives a shutdown request from the government? Which government agency ordered the shutdown and for what purpose? In what areas is it taking place? How long is it expected to last?

If the company would make just one change—to publicly disclose all information about shutdown requests—customers would at least know what to expect, and where to begin when considering strategies for advocating change.

If you could ask a technology company to make one change in the way it treats user rights, what would it be? Our partners at Access Now asked this very question, focusing on the 24 companies that we score here at Ranking Digital Rights (see the table of recommendations).

This month, Access Now launched a campaign urging each company evaluated in our 2019 RDR Corporate Accountability Index to make just one public commitment to improve their human rights practices.

On October 3, open letters were sent to top executives at each company, asking them to commit to fulfill one key recommendation drawn from the RDR Index. The letters also call for greater transparency and urgency in safeguarding privacy and freedom of expression for users.

Internet shutdowns and content censorship were a major driver of several recommendations. Government and third-party requests to shut down networks, hand over user information, or block content were issued to América Movil, Bharti Airtel, MTN, Ooredoo, Orange, Telefonica, Telenor, Vodafone, and Yandex.

Some companies in the RDR Index do not make explicit commitments to protect or promote human rights at all. The letters advise these companies—Axiata, Kakao, Mail.Ru, and Tencent—to make and publish formal commitments to uphold freedom of expression or privacy.

Other letters targeted more specific areas, such as the handling of user information (Etisalat), protecting net neutrality (AT&T), articulating data breach policies (Verizon Media), and notifying users when restricting access to content (Microsoft).

The letters also urge certain companies to strengthen governance and oversight (Apple and Deutsche Telekom), provide grievance mechanisms (Baidu, Google, and Samsung), and conduct human rights impact assessments of targeted advertising practices (Facebook and Twitter).

Without the kind of transparency that we and our partners at Access Now ask of these companies, they cannot truly be held accountable to the public. RDR is proud to renew its partnership with Access Now in engaging with these companies to advance rights-respecting policies and products. In our previous letter campaigns, 15 out of 22 companies responded to our recommendations in 2018, and 12 of 16 companies responded in 2016.

This year, Access Now gave the companies two weeks to respond to the letters for 2019. You can find company responses to this year’s letters from our recommendations table and the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre as they become available.

18 Oct

Posted at 12:21h in Announcements, Featured, News by
0 Likes

Markus Spiske/Unsplash

Earlier this year, we began a process of expanding the RDR Index methodology to address human rights harms associated with companies’ ​targeted advertising policies and practices​, and for their use and development of algorithmic decision-making systems. Today, we are thrilled to publish draft indicators and to invite feedback from companies, policy experts, internet users, and other stakeholders. 

Our goal with these new indicators—which will be piloted in the coming weeks—is to set global accountability and transparency standards, grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), for how major, publicly traded internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies can demonstrate respect for human rights online as they develop and deploy these new technologies. A description of the methodology development process can be found on our website.

In the coming weeks, we will be assessing these draft indicators by conducting a pilot study, as well as seeking input from the companies ranked in the RDR Index. Company feedback is a key component of our approach, and will complement the input we received from other types of stakeholders throughout the year.

The draft indicators can be downloaded at the following link: “RDR Corporate Accountability Index: Draft Indicators—Transparency and accountability standards for targeted advertising and algorithmic decision-making systems.”

Please send feedback to methodology@rankingdigitalrights.org. We look forward to hearing from you. 

To stay informed about our progress and plans, please subscribe to our newsletter.

03 Oct

Posted at 17:43h in Announcements, Featured, News by
0 Likes

New support helps add depth to senior management and raise visibility

RDR is growing! 

Since 2015, four iterations of the RDR Corporate Accountability Index have made a clear impact on some of the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies. Many have improved disclosures, policies, and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy in response to RDR’s findings. Thanks to the generous support of our long-standing funders, RDR is setting clear standards for how tech companies should respect their users’ freedom of expression and privacy. 

Now, with support from three new funders in 2019—Luminate, Mozilla, and Craig Newmark Philanthropies—we are taking our first steps toward scaling up and achieving our strategic priorities. The new funding enables us to develop research publications for a broader range of audiences, deepen our engagement with companies, scale up RDR’s operations, strengthen our senior management, and increase our visibility in U.S. and international media. 

To that end, in September RDR welcomed three new members to the team, including our first deputy director, Jessica Dheere. As a former managing editor and founder and former executive director of SMEX, a leading Middle East–based digital rights organization, Jessica brings more than two decades of experience managing operations and communications in media and digital rights. In addition to overseeing day-to-day management of RDR, she will lead the implementation of RDR’s strategic priorities, build out the RDR team, and also apply her experience as an early innovator in the digital rights field to identify new opportunities to expand and meet the diverse needs of our range of stakeholders.

In addition, Hailey Choi has joined RDR as communications associate. With experience leading projects for the Digital Impact Alliance at the United Nations and the Center for International Policy, Hailey is the anchor member of our growing communications team. 

Finally, Zak Rogoff, who has been integral to developing RDR’s new draft indicators on targeted advertising business models and algorithmic decision-making—to be published later this month and piloted this fall—has joined RDR as a full-time research analyst. Before turning to research, he campaigned for Access Now, the Free Software Foundation, and Fight for the Future. 

These new additions—and several more to come before the end of the year—position RDR not only for more growth, but also for greater impact. 

If you believe that benchmarking companies on the quality and transparency of their policies is essential to protecting and respecting digital rights, come work with us. RDR currently seeks an Editorial and Communications Manager who can raise our visibility among diverse stakeholders in both U.S. and international media (apply by Oct. 7) and a Company Engagement Lead & Research Analyst who will strengthen companies’ understanding of why and how they are evaluated by the RDR Index, and what specific steps they need to take to better align their policies and practices with human rights standards (apply by Oct. 14).

26 Sep

Posted at 16:28h in Featured, News by
0 Likes

Andrew Kazmierski/Shutterstock

Governments committed to a free and open internet must do more than sign statements to ensure that the internet supports and sustains human rights for future generations.

This week, world leaders descended on New York City for the UN General Assembly’s annual debate. While issues like climate change, migration, military conflict, and economic inequality have dominated the news, many government delegations also came to talk about the problems and opportunities of globally networked digital technologies.

On Monday, 27 countries issued a joint statement on “Advancing Responsible State Behavior in Cyberspace.” It affirms that an “international rules-based order should guide state behavior in cyberspace,” including a commitment to universal human rights standards:

“We reiterate that human rights apply and must be respected and protected by states online, as well as offline, including when addressing cybersecurity. …As responsible states that uphold the international rules-based order, we recognize our role in safeguarding the benefits of a free, open, and secure cyberspace for future generations.” 

We appreciate this public commitment, but governments must do more than sign statements. Not only must they uphold their own constitutional and treaty obligations to protect and respect human rights, but also they must ensure that the companies that provide the infrastructure, content moderation, and other services that more than half the world now rely on do not corrode fundamental human rights, especially the rights to freedom of expression and privacy. 

In order for people to exercise their rights and hold power accountable in our digitally networked age, internet users must be able to know who controls their ability to connect, speak online, or access information; and who has the ability to access and share their personal information. Four iterations of the RDR Corporate Accountability Index have underscored how people around the world still lack basic information about how private and government entities exercise power over their digital lives. 

Meanwhile, governments are responding to serious national and public security threats perpetrated through networked communications technologies. Some regulations have improved company disclosures, policies, and practices. Far more have made it harder for companies to meet global human rights standards for transparency, responsible practice, and accountability in relation to freedom of expression and privacy. 

In our 2019 RDR Index report we cite some concrete examples: Many regulatory efforts targeting hate speech and disinformation on social media are pushing companies to over-censor journalism and activism even as they fail to address the harms caused by the abuse of their rules. Government surveillance via internet, mobile and telecommunications companies is growing less accountable and transparent in much of the world. And while data protection laws in some places are helping to protect users’ rights, the lack of coherent regulation in other parts of the world enables threats to proliferate. 

Our analysis of these challenges shows that governments could be doing much more to optimize their legal, regulatory, and policy frameworks both to raise the costs of corporate behavior that infringes on people’s freedom of expression and privacy, and to incentivize greater respect for human rights. While we have included recommendations for governments in previous years, in the 2019 RDR Index we expanded the recommendations for governments in each chapter, and we have now summarized all of them in one reference document to provide more concrete, actionable advice for policymakers. 

Measures and commitments should include: Conducting human rights impact assessments on proposed legislation; maintaining limitations on liability for third-party content; instituting comprehensive privacy law; reforming surveillance law and practices to comply with human rights standards; and protecting the right to encrypt. Most important, just as companies should be subjected to more robust oversight to prevent abuses of users’ rights, governments must commit to enabling independent and credible oversight to prevent abuse of their own censorship and surveillance powers. 

Other recommendations emphasize the importance of accountability and transparency by governments as well as by companies. Specifically, we recommend that companies should be required by law to implement board oversight, systematic internal and external reporting, and impact assessments to identify, evaluate, and mitigate potential human rights harms, including violations of users’ freedom of expression and privacy. As we note in our 2019 RDR Index, such laws are starting to emerge in Europe. 

Government transparency must also be strengthened. As the human rights community pushes companies to be more transparent about what content is removed or restricted, and about who has access to people’s personal data, governments should also publish regular reports revealing the volume, nature, and purpose of requests their agencies and branches make to companies.

Access to remedy is also vital. Some countries already require that companies provide grievance and remedy mechanisms, but where they exist, such laws tend to focus more on physical harms or commercial and service issues rather than digital rights issues like freedom of expression and privacy. Laws could do much to improve the quality and availability of grievance and remedy mechanisms for internet users. 

Finally, global collaboration is essential. Governments committed to advancing a free and open internet that supports and sustains human rights should work proactively and collaboratively with one another, as well as with civil society and the private sector. They should work together with all stakeholders to establish a positive roadmap for addressing threats to individuals and communities without causing collateral violations of human rights. 

The 27 signatories should now hold one another accountable for translating words into action. Only then will they deserve applause from internet users around the world. 

19 Sep

Posted at 16:00h in Announcements, Featured, News by
0 Likes

Shutterstock.com

Since the publication of the inaugural Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index in 2015, digital rights advocates in non-English-speaking contexts have asked for versions of our materials in their language. Early on, in 2015 and 2017, we provided Spanish translations, and last year we expanded this effort to make the RDR Index more accessible, including five more languages—Arabic, Chinese, French, Korean, and Russian. This year, we added German, marking Deutsche Telekom’s inclusion as the first German company in the RDR Index.

This means that four-page summaries of our key findings are now available in the lingua franca of the majority of the 24 internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies we rank—17 of which are headquartered outside the U.S. In addition to translating the key findings and charts of the 2019 RDR Index, we also translated the company report cards of 12 of the non-U.S. companies.

Our hope is that these multilingual materials, provided by Global Voices Translation Services, will facilitate access for civil society actors to our unique datasets, benchmarks, analysis, and recommendations and help them engage more directly and effectively with company representatives and government officials.

Making sure that RDR’s work represents the global reach of the companies we rank as well as the companies’ global geographic distribution is key to our quest to motivate change that improves corporate respect for internet users’ human rights both locally and worldwide.

You can find all our non-English-language materials on our Translations page, and below, you will find the 2019 translations listed by type and language:

Four-page summary of the key findings of the 2019 RDR Index:

Company report cards from the 2019 RDR Index:

An overview of the methodology is also available in select languages:

If you have any questions regarding the methodology, translations, or company report cards, please contact us at info@rankingdigitalrights.org.