Our inaugural Telco Giants Scorecard ranks 12 of the world’s most powerful telecom companies on their commitments to protect users’ freedom of expression and privacy rights. It reveals that telecom companies, despite being gatekeepers of the internet for most of the world, are less transparent overall and more susceptible to government demands than their Big Tech peers. Visit the Telco Giants Scorecard and our Key Findings essays to learn why.
We began publishing the RDR Corporate Accountability Index in 2015 and have published periodically since then. In 2022, we split the RDR Index into the Big Tech and Telco Giants scorecards to enable us to dive deeper into the results for each company type. You can access previous editions of RDR’s ranking at right.
To learn more about our development process, consult different versions of the methodology, or to download the raw data from each year’s RDR Index, visit the Methods & Data Archive.
Our methodology has become known as “a gold standard” for assessing how company policies and practices affect human rights. Grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the open RDR methodology comprises 58 human rights-based indicators in three categories—governance, freedom of expression, and privacy—and incorporates opportunities for companies to provide feedback. It has been adapted for corporate accountability research around the world.
Our standards comprise more than 300 questions assessing companies’ transparency and normative practices and are informed by relevant literature, case studies and best practices, and human rights risk scenarios that anticipate potential harms that can result from poor company policies and practices.
“RDR’s comprehensive, multi-disciplinary methodology sets a gold standard for the fact-finding required to assess the human rights impact of the companies that create, manage, and facilitate vast digital networks and spaces.”
— David Kaye, Former UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay in touch!
