Ranking Digital Rights

Ranking Digital Rights produces the annual Corporate Accountability Index: an annual benchmark that evaluates the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on disclosed commitments and policies affecting users' expression and privacy. The Index informs the work of civil society, policymakers, and responsible investors. It produces comparative data across countries and jurisdictions, helping to clarify what policy changes are needed by companies and governments to ensure that the internet operates in a way that supports human rights. The Index is based on an urgent concern: that humanity’s future depends heavily on whether the world’s most powerful internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies can operate in a manner that protects, respects, enables, and sustains the exercise of human rights of all people everywhere. This requires collaboration and innovation by stakeholders across borders, based on a shared commitment to international human rights norms as well as the structures and institutions that make possible the protection and exercise of human rights. We plan to expand the Index to include new issue areas such as algorithmic accountability, as well as transparency standards for advertising technology. Lack of transparency in these areas has aided manipulation of public discourse by malicious actors. Clear global standards for best practice are urgently needed.