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26 Jul

Posted at 13:15h in Featured, News by
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Image created with MidJourney

Soon Ranking Digital Rights will release the Generative AI Accountability Scorecard, evaluating major consumer-facing generative AI services’ respect for the human rights to privacy, non-discrimination, freedom of expression, and freedom of information. Today, we are sharing a consultation draft of the indicators we will use to evaluate companies for the GAIA Scorecard. But, to ensure they are credible and effective, we need your help!  If you’re an expert, or if you have knowledge of these technologies and their related risks to human rights, we’re inviting you to participate in the fast and flexible feedback process. All participants will be credited in the final report unless they prefer to remain anonymous.

Read the draft indicators and give feedback!

The draft indicators are based on preliminary standards we shared along with a detailed rationale and Q&A about the project, in June 2023. The project will use RDR’s ten years of experience ranking tech companies to help address the human rights risks of generative AI, including “turbocharged information manipulation,” bias, non-consensual pornography, fraud, and incentives for continued privacy violations.

Whether or not you wish to provide feedback on the standards, experts and stakeholders are invited to join RDR’s discussion mailing list about civil society and academic projects to evaluate the policies and transparency of generative AI services. To join, send a message request to methodology@rankingdigitalrights.org.

14 Jul

Posted at 10:57h in Featured, News, Partnerships by
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Photo via MidJourney

Despite Central Asia’s political turmoil and fragile democratic institutions, its digital services sector has grown steadily in recent years, a trend accelerated during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. With countries across the region continuing to introduce programs focused on digitization—from work-from-home schemes to e-shops and e-pharmacies—the time was ripe to establish the region’s first baseline for corporate accountability of the growing tech sector. Tracking the way new digital products and services are affecting existing power dynamics between individuals, companies, and government bodies in this region has become more important than ever.

As we’ve noted in the past, government-imposed shutdowns and censorship are some of the most nefarious ways that the ICT sector is deployed by governments to negate user rights. This has happened, in recent years, across this region. For example, in January 2022, protests broke out in Kazakhstan due to rising gas prices. Protestors, who the government accused of attempting a coup, were met with violent repression from law enforcement authorities and armed groups, resulting in over 200 deaths. Access to the internet was also quickly restricted, as the latest Freedom on the Net report recently detailed. This was not the first time that such measures had been taken by the Kazakh government, as mobile internet access had previously been shut down during smaller, local protests in 2020 and 2021.

A similar tendency toward restricting freedom of expression online has also been well-documented in Uzbekistan, where social media platforms and messaging apps were blocked in both July and November 2021 with the introduction of the amended Law on Personal Data, which introduced data localization requirements for online services. Certain platforms were deemed non-compliant and were blocked, including Twitter and TikTok. Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan, the law on Protection from False Information, passed in July 2021, granted power to a government body to demand that websites and social media platforms delete content within 24 hours.

These are just a handful of examples that illustrate how autocratic-leaning governments in the region are creating new challenges to freedom online that call for the explicit safeguarding of users’ rights.

Adapting the RDR Methodology to Central Asia

It is within this context that the Public Fund Civil Internet Policy Initiative (CIPI) chose to carry out research and publish their new report, “Ranking Digital Rights in Central Asia,” using the RDR Corporate Accountability methodology. The report looks at how and whether technology companies in Central Asia have committed to respecting human rights and protecting their users.

We partnered with CIPI to guide them through the process of adapting our methodology to carry out this important new research. Although previous adaptations have been carried out in neighboring countries, such as Russia, this project marked the first time that the methodology was used to evaluate companies in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan.

CIPI focused on three key sectors: telecommunications, e-commerce, and financial technologies (fintechs). They evaluated a total of 16 companies. In each country, these included the two most popular telecom providers, as well as one e-commerce platform and one fintech. This list also includes a mix of fully local services and larger subsidiaries of international companies. This allowed CIPI to compare whether subsidiaries or local companies were more responsive to human rights concerns. For example, CIPI evaluated three subsidiaries of Beeline, owned by VEON, a Dutch connectivity operator. In the e-commerce sector, they included two subsidiaries of OLX Group, owned by Prosus, also based in the Netherlands.

CIPI used a selection of 22 indicators from our methodology, including some covering each one of our areas of focus: governance, freedom of expression, and privacy. Their findings show clear gaps with regards to companies’ disclosures across the board. However, we’ll spotlight two areas of particular concern. Firstly, as network shutdowns continue to present an imminent threat to human rights across Central Asia, companies need to improve their transparency on policies regarding how they respond to such demands and how it affects their users. Secondly, the report highlights the disparity between the human rights commitments large parent companies provide to their users at home (oftentimes in Western Europe) compared to those provided by their subsidiaries in the regions; this is a gap that needs to be bridged.

From Shutdowns to Subsidiaries: Tracking Telcos’ Biggest Human Rights Gaps

As detailed above, the region is no stranger to government-imposed network disruptions, and all the companies evaluated have a track record of filtering websites or even shutting down access entirely in response to government demands.

Despite this fact, CIPI found that none of the telecom companies they evaluated disclosed their processes for responding to government demands to restrict or shut down access to the internet. Users are seldom informed about these shutdowns before they take place. When they are notified, it’s mostly retroactively and indirectly, via social media posts and the company’s website.

For example, when the internet was disrupted during the previously-mentioned protests in Kazakhstan, Beeline Kazakhstan posted a brief apology in the news section of their site, referring to circumstances beyond their control and offering financial compensation. In Tajikistan, following an internet shutdown that took place during a period stretching from November 2021 to March 2022, amidst political tensions, Tcell, a mobile company owned by the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development, posted a brief note on their website attributing the suspension of services to weather conditions. According to CIPI’s report, similar explanations for disruptions have been employed by telcos in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan as well.

Post-COVID uptake of digital services has been particularly notable for the region’s nascent e-commerce sector. E-commerce remains a young, albeit growing, market in Central Asia, and one that has garnered a great deal of interest from international development agencies and institutions. Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have both introduced specialized programs to foster the development of the sector.

CIPI evaluated two subsidiaries of OLX Group— an online marketplace, where people can buy and sell cars, find housing and jobs, as well as buy and sell household goods—in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. At the parent level, though the company doesn’t directly mention freedom of expression, it has clear human rights policies and commitments in place, and even references the UN Guiding Principles. However, the local websites of OLX Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan fail to uphold these same commitments.

The two other local e-commerce platforms evaluated, Lalafo in Kyrgyzstan and Somon.tj in Tajikistan, appear, on the other hand, to have no company-wide human rights policy whatsoever. The OLX subsidiaries performed better in disclosing their data protection practices, including how data is collected, how it’s shared and with whom, and how the company explains the purposes behind the data processing.

CIPI’s report urges all 16 companies to take concrete steps to publish clear and strong commitments to respect human rights and to enhance transparency relating to their oversight mechanisms and corporate structures. They could achieve this, among other ways, by publishing annual transparency reports. CIPI also calls on subsidiaries of large international companies to adopt their parent company’s best practices at the local level, including codes of corporate ethics.

Among the three industries that CIPI focused on, though e-commerce companies showed glaring gaps in human rights policies, this young and dynamic market showed the greatest interest in open communication with CIPI to discuss how they can best improve their policies and deepen their collaboration with civil society. The report’s authors hope that larger companies may eventually follow their lead. Ideally, these comparisons can spark further competition toward stronger human rights safeguards, and companies that follow internationally-recognized good practices will eventually lead the industry.

We invite you to read CIPI’s report in full, where you’ll find detailed explanations of the findings for each indicator and company. If you’re interested in adapting the RDR Corporate Accountability methodology and designing your own research project, you will find all the necessary information in our Research Lab, our free and open hub for the guidance and tutorials you need to launch your own RDR-style research project. If you’re interested in collaborating with us directly, or have any further questions, you can get in touch with us directly at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.

05 Jul

Posted at 13:02h in Featured, Investor resources, News by
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The annual AGM (annual general meetings) season at major tech companies recently wrapped up in a climate of increased scrutiny toward the industry, with the rapid emergence of new AI and AI-powered tools. While these new tools may appear to rekindle excitement in an industry that not too long ago suffered one of its poorest stock performances in years, the potential risks of AI have also raised various alarm bells for shareholders across industries. Widely unregulated at the moment (though the EU’s AI Act is slowly making its way through the legislative process), developments in generative AI promise to worsen human rights risks stemming from Big Tech companies.

Investors had, in the past few years, already begun waking up to the risks of this sector’s immense and growing, yet often unchecked, power over society. Unsurprisingly, tech companies have therefore faced growing calls, including through an increasing number of shareholder proposals, for human rights safeguards against the potentially nefarious outcomes of their emerging, as well as existing, technologies.

Though RDR’s data has long been used to inform investor proposals, in the past two years, as the number of such proposals has risen, RDR began working directly with shareholders to craft them. This year, we provided direct support to three proposals at three of the most important Big Tech companies: Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet (Google). These proposals were aimed at promoting the use of two of the most important tools companies can use to foster accountability for human rights in the digital age: human rights impact assessments and robust and comprehensive transparency reporting.

Emerging Patterns at the 2023 AGMs: the Good and the Bad

The number of shareholder proposals filed rose once again this year, increasing by 14% since 2020. This demonstrates the persistent interest among investors in addressing many of the most nefarious business practices that pervade the tech sector today. Yet overall support for these proposals, both new and refiled, was down during this year’s AGMs—a trend seen across all industries. This follows similar shifts reported during last year’s AGM season.

This trend has many potential explanations. Of course, ever-present barriers like the dual-class share system at companies like Meta and Alphabet giving founders extremely inflated voting power at AGMs play a role in limiting proposals’ success. After last year’s period of uncertainty in the tech sector, including unprecedented losses and layoffs, shareholders may also be refocusing their attention on proposals where risks, including risks to human rights, can be more clearly linked to companies’ business outcomes and material concerns.

There may be another factor at play as well: the information that investors rely on before casting their votes. Many independent investors lack the resources or knowledge to independently verify and analyze each proposal on which they are voting. In some cases, confusingly worded proposals put forward by “anti-ESG” groups may have created confusion by employing similar language to those that call for comprehensive and politically agnostic disclosures on human rights issues. While the number of overall proposals has increased, the number of specifically anti-ESG proposals has skyrocketed over the past several years. Where they were almost nonexistent before 2020, over 50 were filed in 2023.

Finally, large institutional investors often rely on analysis from ESG ratings agencies to inform voting decisions. As we discussed in a recent piece, these ratings often lack the grounding in international human rights standards that the RDR Corporate Accountability Index and other human rights benchmarks offer. To build a more effective ESG ecosystem, rating agencies need to more deeply incorporate the human rights criteria that nonprofit benchmarks offer into their analysis. The human rights community also has more work to do to make sure our data is as visible as possible to the whole of the investor community.

The 2023 AGM Results and Digital Rights at Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet

To better understand how these factors influenced this year’s AGMs, we’re digging deeper into what happened at each of these companies and how this affected RDR-supported proposals:

Amazon

Amazon shareholders voted on a record 18 proposals this year. Like every year prior at Amazon, none of the proposals achieved 50% support. Ranking Digital Rights supported and was cited in a new proposal, developed with Open MIC and filed by the Adrian Dominican Sisters, which called for the company to improve its lackluster transparency reporting and disclose requests received from authoritarian governments to censor content and remove items from its globally dominant e-commerce platform (you can read more about this in Rest of World).

This proposal,filed for the first time this year, received 10% of shareholder support. First-time proposals often receive limited support, but serve as a foundation for multi-year campaigns, gradually rallying shareholders to the cause. This result also exceeds the SEC threshold of 5%, qualifying it to be refiled in the future.

This proposal may also have been affected by the trend of anti-ESG proposals masquerading as comparable transparency initiatives. It was positioned on the ballot immediately before Proposal #9, put forth by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a conservative think tank, which requested disclosure on alleged censorship by the U.S. government. NLPC’s anti-ESG agenda has been well documented over the past several years, as the group has filed numerous resolutions targeting DEI and other transparency initiatives.

Two other digital rights related proposals at Amazon received stronger support, after being refiled, yet support for both dropped in this year’s AGM after gaining traction in 2022. For example, the most successful proposal at Amazon called for due diligence on customer use of Rekognition facial recognition technology. In 2021, this proposal received 34% support which rose to a peak of 41% in 2022, only to drop this year back down to 37%.

Meta

At Meta’s AGM, activist investors faced an uphill climb once again, given the uneven split in shareholder voting power. The company’s dual-class share structure gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg 61% of voting power, up from 57% last year, meaning he could single-handedly vote down any resolution put forward with more ease than ever.

Last year, RDR was joined by several other human rights organizations in calling on the SEC to establish fair rules for shareholder advocacy and to ban the multi-class share option. Proposal #4 called for a phase-out of this system and was, of course, voted down. Yet it managed to garner 28% of shareholders’ support, holding steady from 2022, and had the strongest performance of any proposal for the fourth year in a row. Once again, the official tally does not distinguish between votes with hyperinflated power and regular votes; in reality, more than 90% of Meta’s shareholders who were not Mark Zuckerberg cast their votes for the proposal.

This year, RDR supported a proposal filed for the second time by shareholder groups Mercy Investment Services and NEI Investments. It called for the company to publish a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model. Once again, it came second only to the proposal on dual-class shares, winning 17% of the official vote, though the extent of independent shareholder support (excluding Mark Zuckerberg’s votes) would be far greater.

Alphabet

Shareholders at Alphabet voted on 13 proposals related to digital rights and corporate governance. RDR supported a proposal calling on Google to publish a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model, filed by responsible investor organization SHARE. The proposal received almost 18%, which was the third best result at the company this year. Like at Meta, shareholders face a challenge: Alphabet’s founders—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—control 51% of the vote through their ownership of Class B shares. Like at Meta, the proposal that challenged this dual-class share structure came out on top, with 31% of shareholder support according to the official results.

A new proposal, filed by Boston Common Asset Management, calling for Alphabet to report on how YouTube’s policies align with legislative requirements, received 18% support—the second highest result this year. This first-time proposal’s strong performance may reflect shareholders shifting their priorities to tangible material risks to the company, in this case the potential regulatory fines which the proposal explicitly flags. In the future, other proposals hoping for similar levels of success may consider citing the regulatory regimes that address relevant human rights risks and the responsibility of the company to address these risks.

Where Do We Go Next?

In the coming weeks, we’ll be joining forces with the Investor Alliance for Human Rights’s Anita Dorett to take a deeper look into some of the results at this year’s shareholder meetings and share how investors and our partners in the push for tech accountability around the world can work together to learn from the trends of the past two years to create stronger and even more effective shareholder advocacy at Big Tech companies in 2024.

02 Jun

Posted at 09:23h in News, Newsletter by
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RDR is 10 years old! Over the last decade, Ranking Digital Rights has laid the bedrock for corporate accountability in the ICT sector and exerted pressure on the most powerful of these companies to uphold their obligations to respect and promote human rights. To mark the occasion, we’re taking a look back at five of our proudest accomplishments over the past decade:

  1. Setting the Standard for Human Rights in Big Tech: RDR’s Corporate Accountability Index, based on universal human rights principles, has become a gold standard for measuring how well ICT companies respect key human rights such as privacy and freedom of expression.

  2. Raising the Baseline for Human Rights in Big Tech: With each new edition of our index, RDR has incentivized a race to the top among companies with many making notable policy improvements in the past decade as a result.

  3. Galvanizing the Conversation Around the “Business Model”: RDR recognized early on the challenges the surveillance-advertising business model posed to human rights. Our “It’s the Business Model” report strengthened the connection between this model and the human rights harms we were observing, while galvanizing an essential policy conversation.

  4. Building the Global Movement for Corporate Accountability: RDR’s global reach grew quickly, as organizations across the globe began adopting our standards for their own research projects. In 2021, RDR started partnering directly with organizations, from Central Africa to Southeast Asia, to produce essential research on the policies of ICT company policies.

  5. Becoming a Go-To Partner for Investors Concerned about Big Tech: As members of the investor community have increasingly embraced both ESG and investor activism, many have turned to RDR’s data to push companies to address human rights issues through influential shareholder resolutions.

To read more about what RDR has achieved, and continues to strive for, check out “10 Years of Ranking Digital Rights: Corporate Accountability for Human Rights in the Digital Age” in New America’s The Thread →

Retreat 2023: RDR Looks to the Future

In honor of our anniversary, the RDR team held its first-ever in-person retreat to set our new strategic priorities! Our team arrived from Washington, D.C., Barcelona, Paris, and Montreal.

While we marked this milestone for RDR, we in the digital rights community at large also find ourselves at an inflexion point: Almost every week, tech companies announce the integration of new generative AI into their services. With this in mind, RDR set out the following strategic priorities:

1. Maintaining relevant standards that enhance our collaborations with all stakeholders.
2. Fostering actionable methodology that’s adaptable to new technology and a wider array of companies.
3. Catering to investor needs through an investors-first approach to our work.
4. Growing the movement: With RDR currently supporting 12 adaptations of our methodology covering 34 countries and 122 companies, we will work to both expand and refine the release of partner reports.
5. Communicating smarter by making sure that our data translate easily into media-friendly stories.

While RDR will spend the remainder of 2023 reflecting on a decade of lessons learned, we are currently working on new standards to evaluate the use of generative AI.

We are also proud to announce that our next Big Tech Scorecard will be released in fall 2024, and our Telco Giants Scorecard in fall 2025.

To find out more about RDR’s strategic priorities and future plans, read “RDR Turns 10!– And Looks to the Future” →

Digital Rights Front and Center During 2023 AGMs

The annual AGM (annual general meetings) season is upon us at several major tech companies! This year, they’re taking place in a climate of heightened human rights concern marked by rapid advances in AI and AI-powered tools across the sector. Shareholders are no exception to voicing concern, with several proposals this year aimed at protecting digital rights.

RDR supported proposals at three of the most influential Big Tech companies—Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet (Google)—aimed at promoting the use of two of the most important tools companies can use to create accountability for human rights in the digital age: human rights impact assessments and transparency reporting.

Here’s what happened at each company’s AGM:

Amazon: Beating 2022’s record of 15 shareholder proposals filed, Amazon shareholders voted on 18 this year. Once again, all proposals were voted down despite grassroots support and worker’s mobilization. Ranking Digital Rights supported a proposal developed with Open Mic and filed by the Adrian Dominican Sisters, which called for the company to improve its transparency reporting on censorship demands (you can read more about Amazon’s censorship problem with authoritarian governments in Rest of World).

Meta: At Meta’s AGM, activist investors faced an uphill climb once again due to the company’s dual-class share structure that gives CEO Mark Zuckerberg 61% of voting power. Proposal #4 called for a phase out of this system. Meanwhile, RDR supported a proposal filed for the second time by responsible investors at Mercy Investment Services and NEI Investment calling for the company to publish a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model. Both proposals received the highest level of support, though all shareholder proposals were voted down.

Alphabet: Shareholders at Alphabet are meeting today, June 2, at 9 PST to vote on 13 proposals related to digital rights and corporate governance. RDR supported a proposal calling on Google to publish a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model, filed by responsible investor organization SHARE. Like at Meta, shareholders face a challenge: Alphabet’s founders—Larry Page and Sergey Brin—control 51% of the vote through their ownership of Class B shares.

Stay tuned: RDR will have more soon on the results of this season’s AGMs and shareholders’ digital rights proposals!

Generative AI’s Overlooked Threat: Ads

In Democracy Journal, RDR’s research manager Zak Rogoff details the potential of generative AI for worsening targeted advertising, a threat we may actually be underestimating:

From his piece: “[T]argeting and personalization have long been a major goal of the advertising industry—from George Gallup’s introduction of market research in 1935 to the creation of branded characters like Tony the Tiger in the 1950s… Yet with generative AI, targeted advertising may be entering a frightening new era. These systems will…give the advertising industry a new generation of automated systems with novel capabilities and untold impacts. At my request, ChatGPT generated a name for such a hypothetical automated system: AdOverlord.”

Even without AdOverlord, targeted advertising has already become increasingly dangerous. As Rogoff points out: “In recent experiments, journalists have been able to buy ads on Facebook that promoted drinking bleach to prevent COVID-19, pushed false narratives about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and advocated acts of genocide against Rohingya Muslims.”

But, how much worse could this get once AdOverlord takes over the production of ads? To find out, read Rogoff’s full piece in Democracy Journal.

To Learn More, Come Meet Us At RightsCon 2023!

At this year’s RightsCon, we’ll be focused on three essential issues as we celebrate our decade anniversary: 1) Bringing the tech accountability movement to the Majority World, 2) the potential of ESG standards for digital rights, and 3) the perils of targeted advertising. We hope to see many of you there!

You can find us at the following sessions:

  1. Deep pocket inspection: the promises and perils of ESG standards for digital rights

When: Tuesday, June 6 (10:15 am – 11:15 am local time)

Where: Room Tortuga

  1. Too small to count, too big to ignore: scrutinizing tech companies in the Majority World

When: Tuesday, June 6 (16:30 pm – 17:30 pm local time)

Where: Room Guanacaste 2

  1. Online content moderation: Let’s play “Social Media Against Humanity – Ads Edition”

When: Wednesday, June 7 (9:00 am – 10:00 am local time)

Where: Room Tucan

  1. Targeting telcos: how carriers profit from personalized advertising, and what to do about it

When: Wednesday, June 7 (11:30 am – 12:30 pm local time)

Where: Room Tucan

You can read more details about our upcoming sessions at RightsCon 2023 here.

RDR Media Hits

Cyberscoop: Cyberscoop covered the Make Slack Safe campaign, organized by Fight For the Future, which is pressuring Slack to enable end-to-end encryption for messaging, and included RDR’s analysis of Slack’s privacy protection offerings, explaining that Slack is “in the minority when it came to the practices of most global messaging services.”

Read More at Cyberscoop 


Rest of World: Jan Rydzak and Open MIC’s Dana Floberg published a piece for Rest of World discussing the shareholder resolution that Open MIC filed at Amazon this year with RDR’s support. The resolution called on Amazon to disclose more information about government requests to censor content in its transparency reporting.

Read More at Rest of World

Support Ranking Digital Rights!

If you’re reading this, you probably know all too well how tech companies wield unprecedented power in the digital age. RDR helps hold them accountable for their obligations to protect and respect their users’ rights.

As a nonprofit initiative that receives no corporate funding, we need your support. Do your part to help keep tech power in check and make a donation. Thank you!

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30 May

Posted at 13:29h in Featured, News by
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It’s our 10-year anniversary, which means that RDR has been keeping tech companies accountable for over a decade. In honor of this occasion, the RDR team held its first-ever in-person retreat to set our new strategic priorities! It was a fantastic opportunity to get the team together, and also the first time some of our remote team members met in person. Our team arrived from Washington, D.C., Barcelona, Paris, and Montreal.

While we marked this milestone for RDR, we in the digital rights community at large also find ourselves at an inflexion point: Almost every week, tech companies are announcing the integration of artificial intelligence into their services. Our research seems, today, more crucial than ever. With the integration of algorithm transparency and targeted advertising standards into our methodology in 2020, RDR has always kept abreast of trends in the field. Yet, the speed of evolution in AI today is unprecedented. It calls for us to evolve like never before.

With this in mind, our objectives for the retreat were:

  1. Examine both our accomplishments and our challenges over the past decade. Based on this assessment, determine how we can have the most impact moving forward in a rapidly changing tech landscape.
  2. Determine ways to refine our methods and standards (to allow for more flexibility and to allow us to build new products, including mini indexes!) and consider how we can best strengthen and fortify our relationships with civil society partners and the investor community.
  3. Determine upcoming dates for the release of our next Corporate Accountability Indexes.


The Retreat: RDR’s Strategic Priorities 

On day 1, we met in Amsterdam and headed toward our venue.

Over the next 3 days, we determined 5 strategic areas that RDR will prioritize moving forward:

  1. Setting the standard: Our standards should remain relevant and enhance our collaborations with all stakeholders including benchmarks, regulators, policymakers, investors, and ESG rating agencies. This means making sure our standards are flexible and can be deployed to evaluate both new and emerging technologies.
  2. Fostering actionable methodology: We identified the need to ensure our methodology is more flexible and efficient, and therefore adaptable to both new technology and to a wider array of companies. We also explored ways of providing more targeted information to inform specific policy issues, further extending the work we have begun with our Scorecard “Lenses.”
  3. Catering to investor needs: RDR’s work with investors has grown in recent years. Over the past two years, our data has been employed to great success in a growing number of investor proposals. RDR has directly engaged in many of these. Some of the most successful include:a) A proposal at Alphabet (Google) that informed the company’s decision to terminate its FLoC targeted advertising project.

    b) A proposal at Meta calling for a human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising business model, which became the most successful topical shareholder proposal in Meta’s history.

    This year we are once again actively partnering with investors to bring human rights issues to the table at companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta through shareholder proposals at their upcoming annual meetings. In particular, we conceptualized and developed the first ever proposal on transparency reporting filed at Amazon (and likely at any e-commerce company). The success of these proposals and of our investor work more broadly has made clear the value of an investors-first approach to our work. For this reason, we will begin mapping out investor needs and set out to address them as directly as possible in our upcoming indexes.

  4. Growing the movement: The number of civil society partners with whom we engage has also grown, with RDR currently involved in supporting 12 adaptations covering 34 countries and 122 companies. This means a slew of new data has become available, including on subsidiaries of the companies we rank. This data can also be useful for the investor community, among others. We will work to both expand and refine the release of such reports.
  5. Communicating smarter: RDR will work to ensure that the stories that emerge from our data translate easily into media-friendly stories. We will ensure the media is aware that the RDR staff is able to speak on a number of topics and trends and not just our Scorecards. Some of these include: investors, Big Tech and Telcos, targeted advertising and algorithms, and other important questions related to emerging technologies like AI.

Looking Forward: What’s Next for RDR?

While RDR will spend the remainder of 2023 publicly reflecting on a decade of lessons learned in tech-sector accountability for human rights, to keep up with the rapid advances in new technology, RDR is also taking advantage of our non-Index year to work on the development of new standards for artificial intelligence. These will be shared publicly at the end of this summer. We’re also taking stock of how our methodology and standards can be refined to best serve the needs of our stakeholders, including investors, as well as companies and civil society, when our next Corporate Accountability Indexes are released.

With this in mind, RDR is happy to announce that our next Big Tech Scorecard will be out in the fall of 2024. And our Telco Giants Scorecard will be released in 2025. Also, look out for: New mini indexes on emerging technologies, coming soon!

Stay tuned!

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