The Ranking Digital Rights 2020 Corporate Accountability Index, launching in February 2021, shortly before MozFest, will rank 26 digital platforms and telecommunications companies on their policies affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy. For the first time in 2020, RDR added new standards, ranking companies on their use of algorithms and targeted advertising systems. In this session, we’ll convene researchers and digital rights experts around key questions: What do companies say about their targeted advertising and algorithmic systems? How can companies be more transparent about these remarkably opaque systems? Our longitudinal data can help answer these and many related questions. We’ll ask participants to work together to develop advocacy strategies using companies’ very own words--specifically their privacy and AI policies--to hold them accountable to users.
We hope to use our session to prompt a dialogue between our research team and advocates who are seeking specific data to bolster their strategies. Sharing resources and our expertise, we hope to open up a channel for future collaboration and knowledge sharing. And we hope to keep this line of communication open to receive feedback on how we can frame our research in the future. We will therefore share our contact information and ideally be able to identify a few people/orgs we can work on concrete advocacy initiatives with.
How will you deal with varying numbers of participants in your session?:The more the merrier! No matter the number of participants, we will be able to foster a constructive conversation on the path forward to making the algorithmic systems big tech uses more transparent. In the event that we have a large number of participants, we will be mindful of making sure that a variety of voices have time to share and definitely use the breakout rooms option for part of the workshop. In the event that we have just a few participants, we’ll benefit from a more in-depth conversation as one group.
What is the goal and/or outcome of your session?:The goal is to share our concrete information around companies' disclosures and policies on targeted advertising and algorithmic systems with others so that the impact of the findings can be amplified by others in the digital rights space. We hope people will leave the session feeling more equipped to hold companies accountable and that their resulting advocacy efforts will be successful, and lead to more transparency.
Veszna is the Research Manager with Ranking Digital Rights. Before that, she worked with several Hungarian and international NGOs and focused on democracy, media freedom, political extremism in Central Europe
Lisa Gutermuth is Senior Program Manager of Ranking Digital Rights.