(Credit: Idrees Abbas/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
A long-running exercise in holding tech companies accountable has published a new round of rankings for the first time in 2.5 years, and the scores are as harsh as ever.
Ranking Digital Rights' (RDR) 2025 Big Tech Edition, published Monday, covers 14 large tech firms based in the US and abroad and finds them all mediocre at best. Its highest score of 50 out of 100 goes to Microsoft, while Amazon and the Russian firm VK share a low score of 27.
"Three years of geopolitical earthquakes and dramatic shifts in technology have only entrenched the power of Big Tech companies," RDR says. "They needed to step up to protect people’s rights from new and existing threats. But instead of big breakthroughs, we found some big breakdowns — and plenty of stagnation."
That resumes the pattern that RDR set with previous reports. In a December 2022 grading of telecom firms, Spain’s Telefónica earned the highest score of just 57. Since then, this project has seen some organizational turnover: Last January, it moved from its Washington think tank host, New America, to the World Benchmarking Alliance, an Amsterdam nonprofit.
Throughout, RDR has adhered to a methodology that rewards organizational commitments to human rights criteria like freedom of expression and privacy. The idea is that companies that take that step make it easier for everybody else to hold them accountable. However, this process-centric approach can also lead to RDR neglecting the real-world effects of these companies’ operations.
Microsoft on Top—Just Barely
(Credit: RDR)Microsoft earned that 50 for posting a company-wide human-rights statement and providing more transparency about its user data collection, terms-of-service enforcement, and response to data breaches. However, RDR says these steps are offset by opacity in the company’s advertising processes and rules and in the possible human-rights impacts of how it operates.
Amazon, meanwhile, got dinged for a continued inadequate disclosure of how it responds to government demands. (I can attest that its transparency reports are lamentably thin compared with other tech firms of its size.) RDR also highlighted a 2024 study by CitizenLab that found Amazon refused to ship thousands of books in such categories as “LGBTIQ, the occult, erotica, Christianity, and health and wellness” to countries like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates while suggesting to customers that ordinary logistics hangups were at fault.
(Credit: RDR)X, which as Twitter held the top spot in the 2022 edition with a score of 56, plunged to 40. The reason in two words: Elon Musk. The tech oligarch’s takeover of that platform and subsequent dismantling of much of its content-moderation machinery and repeated alterations of its rules for reasons that often seem driven by Musk’s whims left its governance score at 9%.
RDR also notes that, contrary to Musk’s free-speech bluster, X has become more cooperative with government demands, complying fully with 90% of “government censorship and surveillance demands.”
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, took second place with a 49% score, credited to quality disclosures of its due diligence processes, risk assessments from government regulations, and YouTube’s algorithmic recommendation system. That's offset by the continued absence of “sufficient tools to control the collection and inference of their data or the use of their information for targeted advertising.”
(Credit: RDR)Meta was third at 47% despite ending its fact-checking efforts and scaling back much of its content moderation work overall; RDR’s report says the company’s efforts “stagnated” and notes concerns over the suppression of Palestinian voices opposing Israel’s invasion of Gaza after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks.
Consequently, we can’t imagine that any Apple fans are pleased to see that firm come in behind Meta at 44%. Despite giving Apple the highest privacy score of any company, 55%, RDR objected to the company’s opacity about how ad targeting works on such platforms as Apple News and the “limited data” provided about rule violations in the App Store, which in the US remains the only way for most people to install apps on an iPhone or iPad.
The project also assessed two foreign-owned firms with an immense US presence, TikTok owner ByteDance and Samsung.
ByteDance, now facing a second deadline to find a US buyer for TikTok’s American operation beyond the only one cited in the law requiring that divestiture, placed surprisingly high with a score of 43%. RDR’s report says that reflects its publishing of transparency reports with limited details about what kinds of government requests for data it fields and its partial disclosure of how it runs its algorithmic content recommendation system.
Samsung, meanwhile, got smacked with a score of 28%. RDR approvingly noted its improved privacy policies but sounded fed up by the company’s long-running failure to disclose government demands for data: “Samsung is now one of only two of the assessed companies providing no public information on how it handles government demands for user data.”
Among companies with no meaningful US presence, the Korean social-networking firm Kakao did best with its 44% score, reflecting its transparency about freedom-of-expression policies on its messaging and VoIP services and its opacity about privacy and ad targeting.
Three Chinese tech giants—Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent—had mediocre scores of 33%, 33%,, and 30% for their unsurprising silence about how they handle government demands for data, not that they have any say in that matter. The Russian search firm Yandex barely did better with a 37% score that reflected a similar absence of disclosure about the information it hands over when the Russian government asks.