Bridge Blog Article Page - Ranking Digital Rights

29 Nov RDR’s First-Ever Telco Giants Scorecard Is Coming Soon!

Posted at 11:07h in Announcements, Featured, News by RDR Staff 0 Comments

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Save the date! RDR’s Telco Giants Scorecard is coming soon. Our set of telco rankings will launch on December 5, featuring our evaluations of 12 telecommunication companies’ published policies and their effects on people’s human rights. The companies we rank cover ten countries, with subsidiaries operating in more than 150 nations. Overall, the ramifications of these companies’ policies touch billions of people worldwide.

Following Up on this Spring’s Inaugural Big Tech Scorecard

Since 2015, we have published five editions of our Corporate Accountability Index, evaluating the world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecom companies according to their policies on corporate governance, freedom of expression and information, and privacy. The RDR Index has appeared almost annually (in 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020) since our inception.

This year, for the first time, we divided our Corporate Accountability Index into two parts. The first part, now known as the Big Tech Scorecard, published in April, covered 14 digital platforms. The Big Tech Scorecard highlighted the fact that digital platforms are doing far too little to address the negative ramifications of their policies, including during critical moments like elections and pandemics. Moreover, Twitter came out on top of our ranking for its detailed content and content moderation policies. But now, with Elon Musk at the helm, the company appears to be hard at work dismantling key policies, and firing the human rights team, that helped it achieve its top spot.

Spotlighting Telcos’ Unique Human Rights Harms

While digital platforms have received a great deal of attention lately for the harms they perpetuate, telcos, still the primary providers of internet access globally, are just as likely to enable human rights violations. This is particularly true in two areas with risks to human rights usually associated with platforms: algorithmic systems and targeted advertising. In fact, there are strong incentives at present for telcos to exploit their large troves of data by engaging further in surveillance-based advertising.

Telcos, whose operations are much more intimately tied with governments, also perpetuate harms that platforms do not. Governments, especially in authoritarian regimes, have been ordering telcos to shut down their networks with increasing regularity. Meanwhile, all but one company we rank, U.S.-based AT&T, offers a zero-rating program, in violation of net neutrality principles. And, if pressured to do so, telcos can also hand over users’ communications, demographic, and billing data to both governments and corporate actors that can abuse this data for their own gains. Telcos, and the human rights risks they perpetuate, are in clear need of renewed attention.

Like the Big Tech Scorecard, the Telco Giants Scorecard will include per-company evaluations, industry-wide rankings, and a summary of key findings. We’ve separated our key findings into nine standalone essays, focusing on key themes specific to telcos. This includes a spotlight on net neutrality and zero rating, freedom of expression issues like shutdowns, a look at the unique ways telcos participate in targeted advertising, as well as an essay examining the discrepancies between parent companies and their subsidiaries in committing to human rights.

Expanding the Scope of RDR’s Accountability Standards

Some of the key findings this time around are buttressed by data from partner organizations that have adapted RDR’s methodology to help keep telcos accountable in their local contexts, as well as supplemental findings describing the ways in which telcos are engaged in targeted advertising. Many of the threats we document, including network shutdowns and internet censorship, are amplified even further in the majority world thanks to information asymmetries about the unique ways company policies violate human rights in these countries. In addition, subsidiaries of large telecom multinationals do not always implement the same level of human rights protections for their operating companies as they do in their home market. In October, we launched our Research Lab, which provides researchers and advocates with the tools necessary to continue implementing and adapting RDR’s methodology, thus extending the reach of our accountability standards.

Finally, while telcos perpetuate important digital rights harms, they also disclose less information about their policies and practices. We hope that by giving telcos their own output, we might be able to shed new, much-needed light on their activities. And we hope that more peers in the digital rights and corporate accountability communities—including activists, researchers, journalists, policymakers, and investors—will join us.

28 Nov RDR’s Submission to the FTC on Commercial Surveillance

Posted at 10:21h in Featured, News by Nathalie Maréchal 0 Comments

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Photo created by Bricklay. Via Noun Project.

On November 21, RDR submitted comments to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in response to its Announcement of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) on commercial surveillance and data security.

As we note in the submission, we commend the FTC for its thoughtful consideration of the problems associated with commercial surveillance, including surveillance advertising and data security, and welcome the opportunity to respond to the ANPR. The concerns raised by the FTC have important implications for privacy, freedom of expression, the right to non-discrimination, and the enjoyment of other fundamental rights. In the absence of robust private or public mechanisms for corporate accountability, the harms stemming from commercial surveillance practices are simultaneously less visible than they should be and increasingly dangerous and difficult to address. We conclude our comment with a set of recommendations for the Commission to consider in its future rulemaking proceedings, which you can find below.

In our comment, we highlight the myriad harms of commercial surveillance, while urging the Commission to use its authority to regulate it and ultimately abolish surveillance advertising. While doing so, the Commission must also recognize that the path ahead is fraught with political and legal uncertainty. Not least among these uncertainties is the future of the American Data and Privacy Protection Act (ADPPA). The Commission should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, nor should it be unnecessarily timid in its ambition to protect consumers.

More specifically, our recommendations include:

That the FTC regulates commercial surveillance as an unfair trade practice–de facto banning surveillance advertising.
Moving beyond “notice and consent” frameworks, which put the onus on consumers to read and understand complex privacy policies and legal notices.
Establishing standards for data minimization and purpose limitation through a Section 5 Unfairness Rulemaking.
Specifying permissible purposes for data collection, use, and sharing. Our recommendation on this item is largely congruent with what’s proposed in the ADPPA, while also urging the FTC to prohibit all surveillance-based targeted advertising.
Finally, RDR recommends that the Commission obligate companies to disclose their data practices to the FTC and to the public, as well as submitting to regular audits.

Read RDR’s full submission to the FTC on Commercial Surveillance and Data Security.

15 Nov The Radar: Musk’s Twitter Takeover: Why the Public Square Can’t Rely on Surveillance Ads

Posted at 13:22h in Newsletter by RDR Staff 0 Comments

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It’s been less than one month since Twitter officially became the plaything of billionaire Elon Musk. In that time, the company that topped our 2022 Scorecard has gone a long way toward unraveling much of the work that recently earned it our top spot.

In other words, Musk has already proven our worst fears about his management of the platform. A decade ago, many in the top echelons of Twitter saw the platform as the “free speech wing of the free speech party.” Yet, since then, the company made a concerted effort to improve both its enforcement of rules and its transparency. A lot of this seems out the window now. For one, Musk has gotten rid of the entire human rights team and other experts on international human rights standards. Twitter, like other platforms, had in place a practice of pushing back against calls for violence from government actors and their attempts to block content. Twitter’s ability to do both these things is severely curtailed. Musk also introduced an $8 fee for “verification” that many worried could imperil the work of journalists and activists. This new feature was paused on Friday after an immediate proliferation of impersonations of high-profile accounts.

On the platform in question, RDR’s Jan Rydzak has a must-read thread on these and other ways Musk is already turning Twitter into a paragon of “pay-for-play anarchy.”

Is a boycott from advertisers, Twitter’s real customers, now the only way to hold the “Chief Twit” accountable for respecting democracy and human rights? This is the question RDR’s Policy Director Nathalie Maréchal asks in a piece for our home institution, New America.

Unfortunately, that may just be the case. That’s why RDR has joined more than 60 other civil society groups in calling on Twitter advertisers to demand that Musk #StopToxicTwitter.

But if advertisers have that kind of power, that’s only because the system is rotten. At the heart of the problem, Nathalie points out, is that a profit-seeking entity dependent on advertising revenues can never be a truly democratic digital public square. This is true whether or not Musk decides to run Twitter with profit in mind, or by enacting his own murky concept of “freedom,” in other words his own personal whims. (We’ve already seen that parodies of Musk seemingly aren’t protected by his version of the First Amendment.)

Social media companies are thus “trying to square an impossible circle”: provide what billions of people have come to see as an essential public service while delivering returns to shareholders. And taking Twitter private won’t free the company of this issue: Repaying the banks who underwrote the sale could cost up to $1 billion a year, The New York Times has reported.

As Nathalie explains, and as RDR has pointed out time and time again, any business that relies on pervasive and sustained human rights violations will only foster more abuse. And this is very much the case with surveillance advertising. Algorithms optimized to make sure users click as much as possible, to see as many ads as possible, necessarily lead to a major decline in the quality of our information. Yet, moderating content at scale in a responsible way is extraordinarily expensive, and the money has to come from somewhere.

For this reason, RDR will be watching with a close eye the seeming mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon. Might Musk’s disastrous first days as Twitter head be the spark that pushes us to seek out new more democratized and decentralized communications systems? And if so, what new business models will emerge to fund them? Only time will tell.

Red Card on Digital Rights at the 2022 World Cup

As the 2022 FIFA World Cup approaches, RDR has teamed up with Arab digital rights NGO Social Media Exchange (SMEX) to launch a three-part series, “Red Card on Digital Rights.” The series investigates the state of the internet and digital surveillance in host country Qatar, amid a slew of criticism over the country’s human rights record.

Read Part One of “Red Card on Digital Rights.” →

See also how SMEX adapted RDR’s methodology to analyze the policies of the Hayya app, which is required to attend the games, and the risks it poses to users’ privacy.

The RDR Research Lab Is Finally Here! How We’re Helping Grow the Global Tech Accountability Movement

For years, civil society organizations across the world have been adapting RDR’s standards to highlight how a lack of platform accountability affects digital and human rights in their home countries.

In October, RDR launched a new online learning hub for digital rights researchers and advocates who wish to join them and launch their own project to keep digital platforms, telecommunication companies, and other digital service companies accountable to users and to the public, anywhere in the world.

The site guides researchers through the process of designing, executing, and promoting research on platform accountability using RDR’s methodology and standards. This guide is based on our experience producing the RDR Corporate Accountability Index and Big Tech and Telco Giants Scorecards, as well as on feedback from civil society partners who have published their own RDR-style reports.

Read more from RDR’s Global Partnerships Manager Leandro Ucciferri about the Lab . →

How RDR’s Standards Are Being Used in Some of the Most Precarious Spots for Digital Rights

Photo by Dying Regime via CC 2.0

This year, in South and Southeast Asia, EngageMedia and other local digital rights organizations worked with RDR to investigate the policies of local telcos, as well as the subsidiaries of telco giants like Orange, within the context of the digital security issues faced by human rights defenders in the region.

The dramatic growth in the use and availability of mobile broadband across Asia has meant unprecedented access to new tools like email, messaging apps, and social media for the region’s human rights activists. But this has also resulted in the growth of online attacks to intimidate those fighting injustice, including female journalists, indigenous youth, and LGBTQ activists.

With governments around the world failing in their duty of protection, corporate accountability has become an increasingly important tool for civil society actors looking to enhance digital rights.

Also, find out how researchers and advocates in Lesotho, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and the Central African Republic are using our standards to hold telcos accountable for privacy and other essential human rights. →

Digital Rights Dialogues: Hear Directly From People Holding Platforms Accountable for Human Rights

Our research lab features interviews with the advocates and researchers already using RDR’s standards to keep platforms accountable, including in some of these most critical spots for digital rights.

In September, protests erupted across Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested for “improperly” wearing her hijab, according to the country’s “morality police.” This mass mobilization was sparked over social media, where news of the death spread rapidly. Yet, in response to ongoing protests, online organizing has been met with internet shutdowns and app outages.

We recently published an interview with Roya Pakzad and Melody Kazemi, of Taraaz and Filterwatch, whose 2020 report evaluated the policies of four popular local and two international (WhatsApp and Telegram) messaging apps in Iran.

In this conversation, they discuss the longstanding use of government shutdowns, the Iranian government’s efforts to push citizens onto government-controlled apps, the proposed “User Protection Bill” that threatens to further block access to social media and the web, and the importance of the country’s corporate accountability movement.

And, check out our interview with Jenni Olson from GLAAD about how the LGBTQ rights org used RDR’s standards to keep Big Tech accountable for online hate. →

RDR Media Hits

The Washington Post: The Technology 202 covered Fight for the Future’s “Make DMs Safe” campaign calling on tech platforms to implement end-to-end encryption by default, which RDR joined. The article quotes RDR Policy Director Nathalie Maréchal: “I think most people don’t understand that if they communicate through, say, Facebook Messenger … that it’s not actually private.”

Recent Events

Global Voices | Can citizens of democracies still trust the law?

RDR Program Manager Vezsna Wessenauer joined a Global Voices panel to discuss how governments are increasingly using the law to infringe on citizens’ digital rights.

Watch the panel

Save the Dates!

December 5: Save the Date for the First Edition of RDR’s Telcos Giant Scorecard!

December 7: Save the Date for our TGS Launch Event!

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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11 Oct Press Release: Ranking Digital Rights Launches New Research Lab

Posted at 09:31h in News, Press by RDR Staff 0 Comments

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**FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE**

October 11, 2022

Contact: comms@rankingdigitalrights.org

Ranking Digital Rights Launches New Research Lab to Help Global Civil Society Groups Hold Big Tech Accountable

Washington, D.C. – Today, Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) is launching the RDR Research Lab, which will serve as a learning hub for researchers and advocates across the globe. It provides the tools necessary to implement and adapt RDR’s methodology and human rights standards in various local contexts to help keep digital platforms, telecommunication companies, and other digital service companies accountable for safeguarding the human and civil rights of users.

Since 2013, the RDR methodology has served as the gold standard for keeping Big Tech power in check. The RDR Corporate Accountability Index, including the Big Tech and Telco Giants scorecards, is the only open dataset on companies’ commitments and policies affecting users’ rights. Since this work began, many companies we rank have made significant improvements in their adherence to human rights principles and transparency. But, with growing threats to these rights stemming from disinformation, surveillance advertising, as well as network shutdowns and internet censorship, among others, much work remains. These threats are amplified in the majority world where, for too long, tech companies have taken advantage of information asymmetries to further neglect user rights, resulting in well-known instances of violent unrest and human rights violations.

Civil society organizations around the world have been inspired by RDR and have used our standards to push technology companies toward greater respect and protection of people’s rights to both privacy and freedom of expression. Between 2016 and 2021, nine research reports were published that adapted RDR’s methodology in Pakistan, India, Kenya, Senegal, Russia, the Arab region, New York City, Iran, and Ukraine.

In 2021, RDR began providing direct guidance and technical assistance to civil society organizations. Since then, new research has been published, with RDR’s direct guidance, in Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Cambodia, Indonesia, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, and Sri Lanka. With the support of the Research Lab, RDR will expand the network of researchers and advocates using RDR’s methodology to hold tech power to account.

RDR Global Partnerships Manager Leandro Ucciferri says:

New apps and digital services are entering the market at unprecedented rates, thanks both to local tech companies and global monopolies like Amazon and Meta. These services have permeated many facets of our lives, but as they become increasingly intertwined with the way we interact with society around us, a lack of accountability means that they also pose serious threats to our rights. The collection of troves of our personal data by companies with opaque, if any, policies for safeguarding it should worry us all. This trend jeopardizes everything from our right to reproductive health care to the integrity of our electoral systems. And it is that much worse outside of the regulatory environments of Europe and the United States, where even greater negligence of human rights standards has resulted in gross violations.

It is therefore imperative that we bring increased scrutiny to as many corners of the tech industry as possible. RDR has provided, and will continue to provide, the standards needed to measure whether tech company policies respect the human rights of their users. In the years to come, the Research Lab will therefore have a key role to play in helping to grow a successful global tech accountability movement.

Media contact: comms@rankingdigitalrights.org

Ranking Digital Rights is an independent tech research and policyprogram at New America in Washington, D.C. RDR ranks leading tech and telecom companies on their publicly disclosed policies and practices affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy.

Learn more about Ranking Digital Rights:

Our website: http://rankingdigitalrights.org

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rankingrights/

07 Oct Growing the Global Platform Accountability Movement: RDR’s New Research Lab

Posted at 15:24h in Featured, News by Leandro Ucciferri 0 Comments

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Today we formally launch the RDR Research Lab, a new resource that guides digital rights researchers through the process of designing, executing, and promoting research on platform accountability anywhere in the world, using RDR’s methodology and standards. This guide is based on our experience producing the RDR Corporate Accountability Index and Big Tech and Telco Giants Scorecards, as well as on feedback from civil society partners who have published their own RDR-style reports.

Civil society organizations around the world have been inspired by RDR’s mission, using our open methodology and standards to push technology companies toward greater respect for, and protection of, people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression. Between 2016 and 2021, nine research reports were published around the globe that adapted our methodology to evaluate the policies of tech companies and their potential impact on human rights in local environments. These included studies on Pakistan, India, Kenya, Senegal, Russia, the Arab region, New York City, Iran, and Ukraine.

Most of these efforts were undertaken independently, with little to no direct support from RDR. But in 2021 we were awarded two grants that enabled us to provide direct guidance and technical assistance to civil society organizations around the world, and particularly in the global south. Our goals are both to expand the network of researchers and advocates using RDR’s methodology to hold tech power to account and, through their research, to help equalize an information asymmetry that has allowed tech companies to pay less attention to their platforms’ human rights risks in the majority world than at home.

Still, even with added resources, we can’t be everywhere at once, so we created the Research Lab to explain our research process and approach and make it easier for new researchers to get involved. The Lab consists of four sections—Prepare, Collect, Analyze, and Apply—each of which offers guidance for a specific part of the research process. We describe the Lab in more detail below.

To develop the Lab, we tried to better understand how people interact with our methodology, looked at potential roadblocks in evaluating a range of tech companies and digital services across the globe, and considered how researchers could make the most of our standards. So far, we have helped guide several local digital rights organizations to publish new research, in Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and in Cambodia, Indonesia, Maldives, Nepal, Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Coming up are adaptations from across Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, and South America.

Diving Into the Research Lab

When you access the RDR Research Lab landing page, you will see buttons for four sections, dedicated to the distinct stages of a project:

Prepare(ing your research)
Collect(ing your data)
Analyze(ing your data)
Apply(ing your research)

In the Prepare section, researchers can read about the fundamentals of writing a project brief and learn how to structure a research project based on our standards. Templates are provided in this section that can be used to carry out a risk assessment and a jurisdictional analysis of the targeted region/country. Other tools for complementing the research and policy analysis are also included, alongside examples drawn from RDR’s indicators.

In the Collect section, you’ll find the research guidance needed to directly evaluate companies, based on our 58 indicators. This guidance is available in English, French, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, and Portuguese. We’ve also included recommendations for software tools that researchers can use to improve their workflow. In both the Prepare and Collect sections, we have included useful checklists to help you keep track of what tasks you need to complete at each stage of the process.

In the Analyze section, you’ll find suggested approaches for studying the data collected and creating narratives that highlight your research findings. You will also find recommendations for data visualization tools, along with a tutorial for learning how to create your first charts.

Finally, in the Apply section, we provide tips and best practices that will help you strategically engage with tech companies, as well as ideas for potential advocacy actions targeting other stakeholders, including policymakers and regulators.

Through our recent partnerships, RDR has helped organizations establish baselines for tech accountability in countries where the industry had, in many cases, so far dodged real scrutiny. Whether through the examination of new types of companies or by evaluating the local subsidiaries of corporations already ranked in our Big Tech and Telco Giants scorecards, we hope to continue seeing greater scrutiny of the tech industry globally. And we believe the RDR Research Lab will play a key role in facilitating that work.

We want to hear from you! If you have ideas or feedback about the materials in the Research Lab, or if you’re interested in carrying out your own research using our methods and standards, write to us at partnerships@rankingdigitalrights.org.