Alibaba Group Holding Limited
Headquartered in China, Alibaba runs China’s largest e-commerce platform, alongside cloud computing, video streaming, food delivery, and various other services. Taobao.com, one of Alibaba’s most prominent domestic retail platforms, had 649 million monthly active app users in China in November 2024. Alibaba’s largest share of revenue derives from e-commerce.
Alibaba tied for ninth place this year, alongside its Chinese peer Baidu. The company achieved the largest increase in both its governance and overall scores, reflecting its efforts to recover from years of regulatory crackdown in China.
Since late 2020, Alibaba has faced intense government scrutiny, including a hefty antitrust fine, following co-founder Jack Ma’s public criticism of China’s financial regulators. In August 2024, China’s market regulator confirmed that Alibaba had completed what they called a “rectification” process, marking the end of government action against the company. Nevertheless, the extended regulatory crackdown weighed heavily on Alibaba, driving down its market value, reducing its market share, and triggering a significant drop in stock price.
In response, Alibaba has since stepped up efforts to comply with regulatory requirements and transparency to rebuild investor confidence. In 2022, China passed an algorithm filing regulation, mandating providers of algorithmic recommendation systems with strong potential to influence public opinion to submit basic information about their algorithmic models to the government. Alibaba went beyond compliance by sharing the core principles behind major algorithms used on its key platforms, including Taobao.com and AliGenie (its virtual assistant service), with users.
In addition to domestic compliance, Alibaba has also rolled out a series of governance initiatives to align with international ESG standards. These include sharing a human rights commitment and reviewing privacy risks related to human rights. While the company demonstrated greater transparency on issues related to privacy than on freedom of expression, shortcomings remain. Notably, AliExpress, Alibaba’s global e-commerce platform, was fined in South Korea for improper user information management, underscoring a disconnect between the company’s stated privacy commitments and their implementation on some platforms.
Jack Ma’s appearance at a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other business leaders in February 2025 has led some to believe that a business revival for Alibaba is imminent. But the question remains: As the company works to restore its market position, will it sustain its momentum in improving transparency and accountability?
The 2025 RDR Index: Big Tech Edition covers policies that were active on August 1, 2024. Policies that came into effect after August 1, 2024, were not evaluated for this benchmark.
Scores reflect the average score across the services we evaluated, with each service weighted equally.
We rank companies on their governance, and on their policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and privacy.
Alibaba achieved the largest improvement in its governance score among the evaluated companies due to the introduction of several new policies. The company committed to respecting users’ human rights (G1). It also disclosed a top-down mechanism for overseeing privacy protection (G2) and implemented dedicated training and whistleblower programs for employees on privacy matters (G3). Alibaba conducted some risk assessments related to privacy but did not indicate that it carried out any related to its policy enforcement, targeted advertising practices, or algorithmic systems (G4b, G4c, G4d). While these governance initiatives strengthened privacy protection, they did not address concerns related to freedom of expression, leaving a gap in the company’s overall governance of digital rights.
Alibaba recorded the third-largest improvement in the freedom of expression category. The company shared how its platforms utilize major algorithmic systems (F1d) and described how its recommendation system operates, albeit with limited details (F12). The company was clear about how it moderates content and advertising on its platforms (F3a, F3b), but it was less transparent on its rules surrounding targeted advertisements (F3c). Alibaba also failed to publish substantive data on the content or accounts it restricted to enforce its rules (F4a, F4b). Taobao.com, one of its core retail services, provided some information on its handling of government and private content restriction requests (F5a, F5b). However, the company disclosed no data related to these requests (F6, F7).
Alibaba was less transparent about how it safeguards users’ privacy than its Chinese peers Baidu and Tencent. While the company outlined clear information on how it collects user data (P3a), it disclosed significantly less about what information it infers (P3b). Additionally, Alibaba fell short in providing sufficient options for users to control their own data (P7). It shared only limited information about the data retained (P6) and what personal information users can obtain (P8). The company clearly detailed its security monitoring and auditing measures (P13) and explained how it manages potential data breaches (P15); however, it was vague about the encryption methods available to users for protecting their data and communications (P16).