Please note: This privacy policy is active as of 17 June, 2026.

Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) is committed to protecting the privacy of visitors to our website. We have established this Privacy Policy to explain what information we collect through our website and how we use it. In this policy, “RDR” refers to RDR staff and consultants, all of whom are bound by law or contract to keep confidential information they receive as part of their work for RDR.

This policy applies to visitors to the Ranking Digital Rights website (www.rankingdigitalrights.org) and to subscribers of RDR’s mailing list.

We hope that this Privacy Policy is easy to understand. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy or about how RDR handles your information, please email us at info@rankingdigitalrights.org. We will respond within 14 days.

Key Points of our Privacy Policy

• We will never sell or rent your information. We only share necessary user information with website and email service providers as described in this policy.
• The RDR website runs on WordPress. 
• The Ranking Digital Rights and the RDR Index websites track visits through Plausible, an open-source and GDPR, CCPA compliant web analytics tool.
• The Ranking Digital Rights website collects and stores the user information that you provide if you subscribe to our mailing list through the Mailchimp plugin on WordPress. Mailchimp’s privacy policy is here.

Definitions: What do we mean by “user information”?

RDR defines “user information” as any data that is connected to an identifiable person, or may be connected to such a person by combining datasets or utilizing data-mining techniques. This includes any data that documents a user’s characteristics and/or activities.

For the purposes of RDR’s website, user information includes your email address, first and last name (optional), and email subscription preferences (optional) if you provide them for the purposes of our email list. See below for the types of information Plausible and Mailchimp collect.

Website Privacy Policy

The Ranking Digital Rights website monitors visits through Plausible, a cookieless web analytics service. Instead of collecting cookies, to count unique visitors Plausible generates a random string of letters and numbers that is reset every 24 hours. So there is no way to connect a visitor’s activity across sessions, days, or devices. This also means that there are no individual records stored, because they are not created in the first place. You can read more about Plausible’s approach to cookieless web analytics here.

Plausible does not create and store user profiles and does not allow for cross-site tracking. Plausible does not collect IP addresses, device fingerprints or persistent identifiers of any kind. 

When you visit the main RDR website and the RDR Index websites, Plausible records the following information:

• Page views: For example “https://rankingdigitalrights.org/news/”. Plausible collects the hostname and path. Query parameters are discarded except for ref, utm_* and similar campaign parameters.
• Referral sources (HTTPS Referer): For example “https://duckduckgo.com”
• The country, region, and city where the visit originated: For example “United Kingdom, England, London”. This information is derived from the IP address, but the IP address is not stored.
• The type of device used: i.e. whether from desktop, mobile, or tablet. This information is derived from User-Agent, but the full User-Agent is discarded.
• The device’s operating system: For example “macOS 10.15”. This information is derived from User-Agent, but the full User-Agent is discarded.
• The browser used: For example “Chrome 86.0”. This information is derived from User-Agent, but the full User-Agent is discarded.

All data is hosted on EU-based servers and never processed by US cloud providers.

For more information, see Plausible’s data policy and security practices.  

We use the information that Plausible collects to understand more about how our readers visit and interact with our website and to learn about what materials people are most interested in.

Mailing List Privacy Policy

We maintain an email list for subscribers to receive announcements from RDR about our work and blog posts published on our website. We use Mailchimp to manage these communications, and we use the Mailchimp plugin on WordPress, which enables people to sign up for the mailing list through our website. When you subscribe to the mailing list, Mailchimp collects and stores the information that you provide, including your email address, first and last name (optional), and email subscription preferences (optional). It also automatically collects your IP address.

We also use Mailchimp’s analytics to understand how people view and interact with our mailing list communications and to learn about what types of updates subscribers are most interested in. If you are subscribed to the RDR mailing list, Mailchimp records the following information and shares it with us for this purpose:

• Open rate
• Total number of opens
• Click rate
• Total number of clicks
• Bounce rate (number of recipients that registered as a hard or soft bounce)
• Number of unsubscribes
• Number of times email was forwarded using Mailchimp’s “forward to a friend” form and subsequent forward opens
• Number of recipients that reported our email as spam
• Time most recently opened
• Time a URL within an email was most recently clicked
• Number of opens and clicks in first 24 hours an email was sent
• Email performance on social media platforms
• Email client used
• Subscribers with the most opens
• Geolocation and top locations for subscriber opens (more information on Mailchimp geolocation here)

See here for further information on Mailchimp analytics. Mailchimp’s full privacy policy can be found here.

You can subscribe to the RDR mailing list by submitting your email address on our website or by emailing us at: newsletter@rankingdigitalrights.org.

You may remove your name from our mailing list at any time by clicking the “unsubscribe from this list” link at the bottom of any email that you receive through the list.

We will maintain the information listed above for the duration that you are subscribed to the RDR mailing list. If you unsubscribe from the mailing list, we will delete and remove your contact information within 30 days.

If you send a request to Mailchimp to remove your data, they will notify us with an email. After we receive the email, we have 30 days to delete and remove your contact information from RDR’s mailing list.

Links

The RDR website provides links to other websites including the website of RDR’s host organization, Superbloom Design (superbloom.design), that we rely on for logistics and communication purposes, such as event RSVP and live video streaming. The privacy policy for superbloom.design can be found here.

We may also link to other websites that serve similar functions. Your use of such linked sites is subject to the terms and conditions and privacy policies of the providers of those sites.

We encourage people to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy policies of each site they visit.

Comments

While commenting is currently disabled on the Ranking Digital Rights website, if a visitor previously left comments on the site, we collected the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. If you have left a comment in the past, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely.

Rights to your data

You can request to receive an exported file of any data we hold about you, which includes any data you have provided to us. In addition, you can also request that we delete any data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for legal purposes.

To make a request, send an email to info@rankingdigitalrights.org; the request will be fulfilled within 30 days.

Changes to Privacy Policy

RDR’s Privacy Policy may change. Any revised privacy policy will be consistent with RDR’s core principles (listed above). If we make any changes to our policies, we will post a notification about the upcoming changes on the RDR website at least two weeks before those changes come into effect. Individuals who are signed up for our mailing list will receive an email notification. We will also link to the notification at the top of this privacy policy page.

An archive of past versions of our privacy policy is accessible at: https://rankingdigitalrights.org/privacy-policy-archive/