10 Years of Ranking Digital Rights: Corporate Accountability for Human Rights in the Digital Age

Over the last decade, Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) has laid the bedrock for corporate accountability in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector by demanding transparency from Big Tech and Telco Giants. We have exerted pressure on the most powerful of these companies to uphold their obligations to respect and promote human rights. At the same time, we have galvanized others — from lawmakers to civil society to activist investors — helping them use our data and insights to advance their missions while growing the global movement for tech accountability. As we mark our anniversary, we’re taking a look back at some of our proudest accomplishments, what they taught us, and how we will take what we’ve learned to achieve even more impact over the next 10 years.

RDR’s Corporate Accountability Index has become a gold standard for measuring how well ICT companies respect key human rights such as privacy and freedom of expression. And RDR’s influence can be felt throughout the corporate accountability space.

Over the years we’ve been cited in the World Benchmarking Alliance’s influential Digital Inclusion Benchmark, and last year in reporting from The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.RDR was involved, alongside New America’s Open Technology Institute and others, in developing the second iteration of the Santa Clara Principles. And the telecom industry group GMSA drew directly from our index when defining three indicators of measurements for what they call “digital integrity” in their proposed 10 key performance indicators to help its member companies improve their environmental, social, and governance (ESG) performance.

With each new edition of our index, RDR has not only highlighted trends in tech company policies, but it has also incentivized a race to the top among companies. Since the first Corporate Accountability Index in 2015, many companies have made notable improvements to their transparency and privacy policies.

In 2022, 13 of the 14 companies evaluated in our Big Tech Scorecard made specific improvements to their disclosures and policies affecting privacy and freedom of expression. In our Telco Giants Scorecard, all 12 companies we ranked made improvements and published a general commitment to both these rights. Companies such as Telefónica and MTN have loudly proclaimed their performance in our rankings, and have used our indicators as a roadmap for consistent improvement.

It is clear that our human rights focus and our belief that “transparency is the first step toward accountability” has played an important role both by compelling individual companies to respond with improved policies and by raising the baseline of companies’ human rights practices across the industry.

In 2019, Shoshana Zuboff published the seminal Age of Surveillance Capitalism, which The Financial Times called “the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called ‘surveillance advertising.’” But prior to its release, RDR was already busy developing new indicators to address the impact of algorithms and targeted advertising — early on RDR recognized the challenges the surveillance-advertising business model was posing to human rights.

RDR’s “It’s the Business Model” report series utilized our new indicators to strengthen the connection between surveillance-advertising business models and the human rights harms we were observing. The first report argued that rampant disinformation was an outcome of Big Tech’s algorithmically-driven business model and why and how the issue should be mitigated.

The Business Model report played an integral role in galvanizing the conversation around surveillance advertising and popularizing references to the perils of the “business model.” The reverberations were felt throughout the policy arena. Congressman David Cicilline used the term while grilling the leaders of major tech giants in an antitrust hearing. Dr. Nathalie Maréchal, one of the authors of the report, spoke on Capitol Hill at the House Hearing on Internet Safety in 2021 about the harms of surveillance advertising. That same year, UN Special Rapporteur Irene Khan referenced the “business model” several times and cited RDR’s work in an influential UN Human Rights Council report on “disinformation and freedom of opinion and expression.” While RDR may not have invented the phrase, our report played an essential role in popularizing it and in emphasizing the issues fundamental to the business model during a contentious and important time for policy discussions surrounding it.

Shortly after releasing our first indexes, RDR’s global reach started to grow as organizations across the globe took notice and began adopting our standards for their own research projects. In 2018, Arab digital rights organization SMEX used the RDR methodology in a report on the state of digital rights for mobile users in Arab StatesThe New School’s Digital Equity Lab employed our standards to conduct research on the privacy rights of internet users in NYC, Internet Without Borders produced a report looking at the performance of large international telecom subsidiaries in Africa, and our standards were used in Russia to evaluate top telcos and their role in state censorship.

In 2021, RDR began partnering directly with organizations worldwide to produce essential research on ICT company policies, including many subsidiaries of companies ranked in the RDR Corporate Accountability Index. Our standards have been adapted and used to evaluate companies across Central and Southern Africa, as well as South and Southeast Asia. In the U.S., RDR partnered with GLAAD to create a platform scorecard to measure how well top social media companies addressed issues facing LGBTQ users. And this year, twelve new adaptations will be published covering companies from Southeastern Africa to Central Asia.

RDR is doubling down on our commitment to ensure the accessibility of our standards, methods, and data to all those looking to join the tech accountability movement. Just last fall, RDR launched its Research Lab, a hub for digital rights researchers and experts, recently expanded the lab with the Scorecard Toolkit, a simple application that helps researchers easily configure complex data management infrastructure, as well as the Knowledge Center, a place where users can access in-depth guidance and interact with RDR and other researchers.

With the recent explosion of ESG investing, RDR is playing an essential role in defining both the “social” and “governance” aspects of this term, as encapsulated more specifically in the digital rights risks companies pose for investors. As members of the investor community have increasingly embraced both ESG and investor activism, many have recognized the utility of independent human rights benchmarks, as opposed to risk ratings, and have turned to RDR’s data and analysis to support their company engagement and shareholder advocacy. In doing so, they have successfully wielded our data to push companies to address human rights issues through influential shareholder resolutions.

Last year we helped craft a shareholder proposal at Meta calling for human rights impact assessments of its targeted-advertising business model, which became one of the most successful in Meta history; and another shareholder proposal at Alphabet (Google) helped inform the company’s decision to terminate its FLoC targeted-advertising project. And this year, we worked alongside our allies to develop the first-ever proposal on transparency reporting to be filed at Amazon — and likely at any e-commerce company.

Capitalizing on the success of our work with investors and their readiness to use our data for finance-focused advocacy strategies, in the coming years, RDR will also work hard to link impact investors to our global partners to ensure that digital rights expand in the majority world.

We’re proud of the strong influence Ranking Digital Rights has had over the past 10 years. Yet we believe in the necessity of further democratizing access to our standards and creating more entry points for people to use our data as we move forward. As we’ve matured as an organization, we’ve wrestled with what media studies professor Lauren Kogen has referred to as the “RDR Paradox”: Our thousands of data points can be used to tell endless stories on tech policy and its effects, but many in the field do not feel they have the tools to analyze such granular data. We’re fully committed to better understanding, and contributing to designing, the future of the tech accountability movement — our Research Lab is one of several ways we’re committed to doing that, along with growing our investor and civil society partnership work.

It’s now been a decade of RDR. For the next ten years and beyond, we will be working with an eye to the future of the entire field of corporate accountability, to which we at RDR have fully and wholeheartedly committed ourselves.

Follow The Thread! Subscribe to The Thread monthly newsletter to get the latest in policy, equity, and culture in your inbox the first Tuesday of each month.