 Hello, I'm Lisa Gudermuth, I'm the Program Manager at Ranking Digital Rights and an Associated Researcher at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society and tonight I will talk to you about the Project Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index. So we rank 22 of the world's largest internet and telecommunications companies on their respect for privacy and freedom of expression. So this is the map of the 2018 index, you can see a few familiar companies on there, there's Apple and Facebook and Microsoft and Twitter. In Europe we have some telecommunications companies, Vodafone, Orange, Telefonica, but we're also worldwide so I'll try to be as broad as possible and so we rank also Russian companies and Chinese companies and Middle Eastern companies all under the same methodology. We don't have Deutsche Telekom yet, but it might be coming soon actually. So before I really begin I would also like to start by posing the question of you've gotten the information from me thus far that we rank internet and telecommunications companies on their respect for privacy and freedom of expression on their digital rights, but then I'd like to ask what people have as ideas of what are your digital rights or what are digital rights, what comes to mind when you think of that. You can just shout it out. No? Okay. Well I have some examples to you. Owner rights. I own my data. Ah, okay. This is interesting. Yes, like controlling your data as well and having the ability to download it. So what I'll do because it's a vast index or how I framed the talk is just by talking about a few of the indicators specifically to get an idea of what we consider and measure as digital rights. So the first indicator I'll go over is the just collection of user information and then a lot of these will seem very basic and they indeed are actually in our view. So this is clear questions of does the company clearly disclose what types of user information it collects. For each type of user information the company collects does it clearly disclose how it collects that user information. And also this is 2017 data I should have said that we've had three indexes thus far. One in 2015, 2017 and just recently launched our 2018 data. And I will get to some of the most recent data and I wanted to be able to demonstrate actually some of the improvements that companies have made. So yeah, this is collection of user information very clear. Sharing of user information. For each type of user information the company collects does it clearly disclose whether it shares that user information. So kind of a level up if you would. But you can already see I mean this graph and the previous one is also good for showing that you can see that Kakao is a Korean company, a South Korean internet company and they're performing the best here with 79% still not 100%. But you see also that Google and Apple are then below 50% and so there's a lot of room for improvement and also when you conduct a study like this you end up seeing companies that can act as examples in certain areas so other companies can actually look to them at their disclosures and say oh actually not only is this possible but I have a way to look to improve my disclosures in that direction. So here's two indicators that are representative of our freedom of expression indicators. So these are and this is now 2018 data. It's process for terms of service enforcement and data about terms of service enforcement and what does that mean. For process of terms of service enforcement it's said shortly it's are they clearly communicating what their community guidelines are what their rules are. We've seen a lot of improvements on this indicator over the years and also even before the index started it was a lot kind of worse where platforms were not clear about what was allowed and what was not allowed and a lot of content was taken down and accounts were cancelled and a lot of confused and angry people or endangered people or yeah so that's kind of a ground rules freedom of expression indicator and then the fourth freedom of expression indicator is data about terms of service enforcement. It's very interesting and timely this year because it's about transparency reporting so not only are you clear about the rules that you're running your platform on but you're also reporting how many taketowns you've had in the last year or what types of content you're taking down and so there's still like considerably less disclosure on that indicator but actually this year just before the 2018 index launch both YouTube and Facebook made some really big steps and I'll show actually at the end a screenshot of the transparency reports in this area so this is something that we're seeing develop and in the same way that government requests for user data are reflected in transparency reports kind of across the board we'll see this more often so those are a few indicators so like as a summary we look at public disclosures and policies we do not do technical testing but we welcome partnerships and have done many partnerships where people couple technical testing with the methodology we ranked 22 internet mobile and telecommunications companies based and used by people all over the world and it's 35 indicators in the areas of governance freedom of expression and privacy and that's the URL as well and you can explore it the most recent index in detail so I'll just keep moving along here so this is another privacy indicator which is data breaches so this is the 2017 data and this is like really basic it's in the news all the time Yahoo had a massive data breach a few years ago Equifax in the United States it happened I mean Facebook it's kind of debated whether there was an actual data breach by definition but data was shared unreasonably and this is it kind of speaks for itself is none of the companies that we evaluated in 2017 had any disclosure in their terms of service or privacy policy or any public-facing documents about I mean making the most basic commitments to inform their users when there was a data breach so and a few telecommunications companies did as you can see and so this is the 2018 data the most recent data and we're seeing a little bit more of disclosure and actually Vodafone this is an example where we we can kind of assume or imagine that Vodafone kind of took the methodology and used it and said okay these are actually not that difficult things to implement and implemented and went from their score last year to a hundred percent and hopefully we'll see kind of both of the general data protection regulation and kind of more examples being shown in the space more disclosure around data breaches it's still obviously very poor and so methodologies are not only useful for evaluations but I've done properly they can be roadmaps for companies so I haven't really stressed this that much this far in the presentation but just as much as it's a research project and the results are useful for other researchers and advocacy groups and policymakers and so on we really are not a project that seeks to be only a watchdog organization we actually our goal is or like one of the things we strive to do is actually work with companies and make sure that they know the methodology and how to improve their disclosures and it's been really interesting because a lot of the time you know the look at the methodology and realize oh I didn't realize I could make this this improvement that would improve my respect of privacy of reading my expression or as mentioned before they'll see a company from the results that has done better than them and look to their disclosures to see how they can kind of copy and build off of it and this is the year-on-year score changes from 2017 to 2018 so from it just in that one year we saw 17 of the 22 companies make net improvements in various areas so but it's like the aggregate improvement and then this is just a little bit more contextual information about the data of terms of service informant terms of service enforcement with the YouTube community guidelines and how they're they're doing transparency reporting and then I'll just close with talking about a little bit more of the collaborations that ranking digital rights has done so in the area of Internet of Things we have I mentioned technical testing before this is actually a collaboration where we're working with consumer reports which is the equivalent of Stiftung-Wagen test in the US and we are doing kind of the portion of work that is looking at disclosures and commitments of the companies and then working with technical partners that are kind of coming together to to then rank Internet of Things products on a holistic kind of it's not a ranking but a score or you know Stiftung-Wagen test yeah scale and then there's also local and regional adaptations of our work so the methodology is readily open to the public and available and creative commons and we've seen a lot of people pick this up so the city of New York City did a ranking of their internet service providers on their respect for privacy and then the dependent yet disenfranchised is a report of Middle Eastern telecommunications companies that did apply the methodology there as well so with that open up for questions