Baidu, Inc.
Headquartered in China, Baidu provides a wide range of internet services, including a social media platform, cloud storage, and Baidu Search, its flagship service, which dominates the Chinese search-engine market.
Baidu ranked ninth among 14 digital platforms, tying with Russian company VK, and surpassing its Chinese competitors and Amazon. But like other Chinese companies, Baidu had a difficult year when it came to regulation, due in large part to a raft of new national laws and pressure from state agencies seeking to curtail tech giants’ growing power.
China implemented its Personal Information Protection Law in November 2021. In its effort to comply with the new law, Baidu publicly stated that it was only collecting data that it needed to perform services that users requested, a practice known as data minimization. But soon thereafter, the company received a warning from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator, that its app, browser, and input method were collecting more user information than necessary and did not allow users to delete or edit their personal data. On the whole, Baidu disclosed slightly less about its protections for user privacy in our evaluation for 2022 than it did in 2020.
Chinese authorities also released a regulation on algorithmic recommendation systems in 2021 that includes some significant transparency requirements. At the end of our evaluation period, Baidu had not yet published a coherent policy regarding its development and deployment of algorithmic systems, despite the new regulation, and the company’s deep reliance on such tools.
The company weathered a heavy rebuke from Chinese regulators concerning “lowbrow” content on its platforms in 2020. In response, Baidu published new information about its internal governance, stating that it had established a committee within its board of directors to track environmental, social, and governance (ESG) issues within the company. It also published a special report on data security, privacy protection, and content management to demonstrate its compliance with new regulations. These changes resulted in the biggest increase in disclosures about corporate governance among all digital platforms evaluated for 2022.
The 2022 Big Tech Scorecard covers policies that were active on November 1, 2021. Policies that came into effect after November 1, 2021, were not evaluated for this ranking.
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.
Despite making the greatest progress in sharing information about its governance procedures, Baidu’s overall disclosure in this category was weak compared to other companies we evaluated. The company vowed to respect users’ “right of free speech”; however, the relevant public disclosure described a mechanism for management oversight, training, and remedy that addressed little beyond privacy issues (G2, G3, G6a). Other than some privacy risk assessments related to its products and AI technologies, Baidu showed no evidence that it conducted any broader risk assessments associated with its businesses, policy enforcement, or targeted ads (G4).
Baidu disclosed less about its policies and practices affecting freedom of expression and information than any other digital platform we ranked. Baidu did provide a relatively detailed description of its process for flagging banned content and accounts, including its use of algorithms in content moderation (F3a). The company also released some data about content, accounts, and ads it restricted for violating company rules, but this data was neither comprehensive nor updated regularly (F4.) Although Chinese digital platforms are responsible for censoring content at the government’s behest, Baidu failed to reveal any substantive information about how it responded to government requests to restrict content or user accounts (F5a, F6). As mentioned above, Baidu PostBar allowed users to opt out of its content recommendation systems, but the company did not specify how these systems were deployed across its services (F12).
Although Baidu shared more information about its policies and practices affecting users’ privacy than it did regarding governance and freedom of expression, the company still lagged behind the majority of digital platforms we ranked. Baidu revealed more than all other platforms about what types of user information it collects (P3a); however, it offered scant details on how it infers (P3b) or shares user data (P4). Along with Amazon, it said nothing about how long it retains user information (P6). Baidu failed to disclose to users that they could turn off targeted ads (P7). Baidu published no information regarding government demands for user data (P10a, P11a), a perennial problem for Chinese companies. On a brighter note, the company released relatively comprehensive information about how it manages data breaches (P15).