What companies say, scored
Do the world’s largest tech companies keep the promises they make about free expression and privacy? Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) answers by scoring what the companies disclose. Founded in 2013 by Rebecca MacKinnon at the think tank New America and housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute, RDR is a nonprofit research initiative whose flagship product — the Corporate Accountability Index — ranks internet, mobile, and telecommunications companies on their disclosed commitments and policies affecting users’ freedom of expression and privacy.
The first index appeared in November 2015, covering 16 companies; the 2019 edition covered 24 companies against 35 indicators. The standards build on international human-rights standards, and the methodology is iterative and consultative: a pilot study in 2014, a full index in 2015, with methodology documents and raw per-edition data published openly.
The method’s own boundary
RDR’s scores measure disclosed policies, not actual practices — that is the project’s own framing, stated in its reports, and it is a method boundary, not a criticism. A company can score well on paper while behaving differently in practice; the index captures the paper. Read it as a transparency measure: which companies say the most, in the most verifiable way, about how they handle expression and privacy.
Founder MacKinnon has described the index’s secondary effects — investors citing RDR data in shareholder resolutions, companies adjusting policies in response, civil-society groups adapting the methodology for other regions. Those accounts are attributed to her; they are not independently verified here. She departed New America for the Wikimedia Foundation in 2021, according to her speaker biography. Seed funding came from a Knight News Challenge grant, with later support from foundation grants and U.S. State Department funding, as reported by Fast Company — the funding source is stated; influence is not inferred.
The current director and details of index editions after 2020 were not confirmed in this pass and are not asserted here. No Chinese name for the initiative has been located.
Using Ranking Digital Rights in research
RDR is the site’s anchor for digital-rights and platform-accountability evidence on the digital-governance pages: the Corporate Accountability Index raw datasets (open at rankingdigitalrights.org) for company-level policy comparisons. Always state the disclosed-policies boundary alongside any score. Do not rank RDR against other digital-rights initiatives; different organizations, different methods. Rebecca MacKinnon’s expert record is anchored here as founder and founding director.