Google, LLC
Headquartered in the United States, Google is a subsidiary of Alphabet, Inc. The company offers some of the world's most popular internet services and products and has captured 90% of the search engine market worldwide. YouTube, its video-sharing service, had 2.7 billion monthly active users as of February 2025. Its email service, Gmail, had 2.5 billion active users in 2024. Google derives most of its revenue from targeted advertising.
Google continued to face lawsuits, probes, and scrutiny over the human rights impacts of its operations and practices. In 2024, Ireland’s Data Protection Commission launched an investigation into whether the company conducted a data protection impact assessment before processing personal data to develop its artificial intelligence model, the Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2). Meanwhile, a U.S. consumer privacy lawsuit alleged that the company secretly tracked users while they browsed in incognito mode. Google settled for USD 5 billion. Additionally, in August 2024, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the company violated antitrust law by operating its search service as a monopoly.
The company also came under scrutiny from civil society groups over its content policies and handling of censorship demands. In Russia, YouTube complied with government takedown demands and blocked several videos related to evading military service. Journalists and human rights groups who shared videos about virtual private networks (VPNs) also received blocking notices. Google was also widely criticized for failing to enforce its own advertising rules against graphic advertisements run by the Israeli government in the context of the war on Gaza. The advertisements were part of the Israeli government’s campaign to drum up support for the war and to discredit the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
Google’s performance in the 2025 RDR Index largely stagnated, but the company ranked second due to its strong past performance, the decline of X (formerly Twitter), and the removal of Yahoo from the assessment. The company provided little evidence of conducting due diligence on its policy enforcement processes, its deployment and development of algorithmic systems, and its targeted advertising policies and practices. The company also failed to align its AI Principles with international human rights standards. On the contrary, in February 2025, it updated those principles, backtracking on previous commitments against developing AI for weapons and surveillance.
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.
Google ranked third in the governance category, behind its U.S. peers Meta and Microsoft. The company disclosed a clear commitment to respecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights, but it failed to ground its AI principles in international human rights standards (G1). It enforced both board and executive-level oversight over how its practices affect freedom of expression and information as well as privacy (G2). It maintained its past disclosures on employee training and a whistleblowing program covering human rights (G3). However, Google’s remedy and redress mechanisms, including its process for handling content moderation appeals, lacked clarity (G6a, G6b). For example, it provided users with grievance mechanisms to submit complaints, but these mechanisms did not cover all types of freedom of expression and privacy violations. Further, while it provided developers of apps on Google Play and skills on Google Assistant with the possibility to appeal content moderation actions, it did not include this option for users (G6b).
Google ranked third in this category, behind ByteDance and X. While the company provided disclosures on what content it does not allow on its services (including advertising content) and the process for enforcing its rules (F3a, F3b, F3c), it provided limited data on the content or advertisements it restricted to enforce its rules (F4a, F4b, F4c). It published a policy on the use of algorithmic systems explaining how its search engine ranks results. It also improved its disclosures about how YouTube’s recommendation system works, including providing an explanation of the variables that affect it. However, it offered no analogous policy or information for its other evaluated services: Gmail, the Android mobile ecosystem, Google Drive, and Google Assistant (F1d).
Google also ranked third in the privacy category, behind its U.S. peers Apple and Microsoft. It lacked transparency about what user data it shares (P4) and infers (P3b), and how long it retains the information it collects (P6). It also provided insufficient options to users to control their data (P7) and access it (P8). The company clearly disclosed its process for handling government demands for user information (P10a) and published a transparency report that provided some insights into the number of such demands received as well as compliance rates. However, Google was not transparent about its handling of private requests for user information, disclosing only the basis under which it may comply with such requests and providing no data about the number of requests received (P10b, P11b).
[1] In November 2024, the EU released the risk assessment reports submitted by very large online platforms, including Google, as required by the DSA. However, the reports were published after the policy cut-off date and were therefore not considered in this assessment.