Every day, big tech and telecom companies bring their products and services onto the market without considering the risks that they may pose for people’s lives and rights.
At RDR, we work every day to hold these companies accountable for the harms they create, using international human rights standards. But we can’t do it alone.
Around the world, civil society groups and advocates are using and adapting our methods to evaluate and hold companies to account.
Visit our guides, case studies, and downloadable resources to learn about our approach and design your project:
The world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications services control our abilities to connect, speak online, and access information. They collect and monetize our data at a massive scale. Yet there is so much we do not know about precisely how and under what terms they carry out these activities.
Since 2013, we have worked to promote human rights online by creating global standards and incentives for companies to respect and protect users’ privacy and freedom of expression and information. The main tool we use to carry out our mission is the RDR Corporate Accountability Index, including the Big Tech and Telco Giants scorecards, which evaluates the world’s most powerful digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their published policies with respect to human rights, measured against international human rights standards.
When we see a company violating its own rules, we are able to use public documentation of corporate policies to hold the company to account. Our standards build on more than a decade of work by the human rights, privacy, and security communities. These standards are consistent with the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which affirm that just as governments have a duty to protect human rights, so do companies have a responsibility to respect them. They also draw on the Global Network Initiative principles and implementation guidelines, along with a body of emerging global standards and norms around data protection, security, and access to information.
Interviews with some of the digital rights researchers around the world using RDR’s standards to hold platforms and telcos accountable for upholding human rights.
In this conversation, RDR’s Leandro Ucciferri and Aliya Bhatia speak with Roya Pakzad and Melody Kazemi about Iran’s government-led startup boom, the localization efforts that threaten users’ rights, and the unique role that the diaspora plays in advocating for digital rights.
In this conversation, RDR’s Global Partnerships Manager Leandro Ucciferri and Senior Editor Sophia Crabbe-Field speak with Jenni Olson, the Senior Director of Social Media Safety at GLAAD, the national LGBTQ media advocacy organization, which campaigns on behalf of LGBTQ people in film, television, and print
