JUST CapitalBeta
Protects customer privacy
Customers
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
What a company collects about its customers, whether it sells that data, whether it follows people across other companies' apps and sites, and who inside the company answers for any of it are decisions the company takes on its own, which is why this sits at the top of the scale. The ranking scores the issue on exactly those disclosures, so the thing being measured is the company's own practice. Apple showed the size of the decision in April 2021, when it began enforcing App Tracking Transparency in iOS 14.5 and required every app on its platform to ask a user's permission before linking that person's data with data collected by another company for advertising, in an industry the Apple-funded study of the policy sizes at 300 billion dollars, and it did so with no legislation behind it. The limits of that example are worth stating: the rule reaches third-party data only, it places no restriction on what an app does with the data it gathers itself, and the same study calls claims about billions of advertising dollars moving speculative. Owners are pressing the same choices at the companies holding the data. Trillium Asset Management asked Alphabet for enhanced disclosure of how it uses algorithmic systems to target advertising, a proposal Trillium says had by then drawn the support of 56 percent of shareholders not named Brin, Page or Schmidt and which drew 19.5 percent of all shares voted in 2022, and Mercy Investment Services asked Meta for an independent human rights impact assessment of its targeted advertising, which drew 845,051,262 shares for against 4,119,907,712 on the company's own count. Amazon's shareholders in 2019 gave 2.4 percent to a proposal to stop selling facial recognition to government and 27.5 percent to a study of the civil rights and privacy effects of selling it. No company in this record is documented as having changed a data practice in response to such a vote, which is a fact about the campaign rather than about who decides. The industry's lobby is the other half of the story and the lesser half. The Markup counted 445 lobbyists and lobbying firms representing Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, TechNet and the State Privacy and Security Coalition across 31 states, Virginia's own bill sponsor says the first draft of that state's law was written by an Amazon lobbyist, and the industry has asked for statutes that bar people from suing; Google and Facebook distanced themselves from those industry groups. Nineteen states passed comprehensive privacy laws all the same, and while the Federal Communications Commission's 2016 broadband privacy rules were wiped out by Congress after eleven petitions from Oracle, Level 3 and nine trade associations, nothing in the record shows that the industry obtained that repeal rather than merely having sought it. The data that gets collected in the first place is still collected by corporate choice, and that is what keeps this outcome decided by what companies do.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- JUST Capital 2025 Ranking Methodology (as of February 3, 2025), JUST Capital
- Mobile Advertising and the Impact of Apple's App Tracking Transparency Policy, Kinshuk Jerath, Columbia Business School, hosted and funded by Apple
- US State Comprehensive Privacy Laws Report, International Association of Privacy Professionals
- Tech Industry Groups Are Watering Down Attempts at Privacy Regulation, One State at a Time, The Markup
- Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services, congressional disapproval, 82 FR 44118, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Register
- Petitions for Reconsideration of Action in Rulemaking Proceeding, WC Docket No. 16-106, 82 FR 10999, Federal Communications Commission, Federal Register
- Through a Series of Shareholder Proposals at Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Investors Underscore Digital and Human Rights Risks in Tech Sector, Investor Alliance for Human Rights
- Alphabet Inc. Form 8-K, 2022 annual meeting voting results, Alphabet Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Meta Platforms, Inc. Form 8-K, 2023 annual meeting voting results, Meta Platforms, Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Amazon.com, Inc. Form 8-K, 2019 annual meeting voting results, Amazon.com, Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Apple Inc. Form 8-K, 2025 annual meeting voting results, Apple Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Apple Inc. 2025 Proxy Statement (DEF 14A), filed 10 January 2025, Apple Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
- Facebook, Inc. Form 8-K, 2018 annual meeting voting results, Facebook, Inc., filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
9 campaigns on record
Asked the company to prepare a report, at reasonable cost and leaving out proprietary or legally privileged information, assessing the risks that come from using data unethically to develop artificial intelligence, the steps it takes to reduce those risks, and how it measures whether those steps work.
Result: Voted on at the December 5, 2025 annual meeting as the proposal for a report on AI data usage oversight. Not approved, but it drew the strongest support of any NLPC proposal in this record: 683,895,858 votes for, 4,435,809,588 against, 63,749,211 abstaining, and 1,137,975,835 broker non-votes. Microsoft reported this as 13.36% support, which is the share of votes for and against.
we found no documented change
A general call to the technology industry and to investors, issued in response to the backsliding documented for the 14 companies scored in Ranking Digital Rights' 2025 Big Tech Index.
With Church of England Pensions Board, Council on Ethics for the Swedish National Pension (AP) Funds, SHARE (Shareholder Association for Research and Education), World Benchmarking Alliance
Result: This was a public statement rather than a shareholder vote, so there is no vote result to report.
We found no documented company response or policy change resulting from this statement in the source reviewed.
Asked the company to report on whether its public commitments on privacy and human rights match what it actually does, particularly where those commitments meet the demands of the governments it operates under.
Result: Voted on as Proposal 8, listed in the company's filing as the privacy and human rights report, at the February 28, 2024 annual meeting. Not approved: 147,994,563 votes for, 8,879,045,656 against, 106,447,688 abstaining, and 3,275,055,901 broker non-votes. That is 1.64% support counting only votes for and against, or 1.62% if abstentions are included in the base.
we found no documented change
Report on the products and user content the company restricts or removes, including the removals it makes at the request of governments.
With Open MIC
Result: Voted down at the 2023 annual meeting with 10.5 percent support.
we found no documented change
The 2023 Amazon Proposals, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, 2023
Commission an independent assessment of the human rights harms caused by the company's targeted advertising, and report the findings.
Result: Not approved at the May 31, 2023 annual meeting, with 845,051,262 votes for and 4,119,907,712 against. Morningstar reports the proposal drew 58 percent support once insider votes are set aside.
we found no documented change
The resolution asked Alphabet to commission an independent human-rights impact assessment of how its algorithmic advertising and ad-targeting systems affect users' privacy and rights.
With members of the Investor Alliance for Human Rights, including Mercy Investment Services, Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment, As You Sow, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation
Result: The proposal won the support of 56 percent of shares not controlled by Alphabet founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page or CEO Eric Schmidt's affiliated holdings, following a 2022 racial-equity audit proposal at Alphabet that had already won 64 percent of the independent vote.
We found no documented change by the company following this vote.
The resolution asked Meta to report on how its plan to roll out end-to-end encryption across its messaging products would affect its ability to detect and stop child sexual exploitation on the platform.
With members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility
Result: By Proxy Impact's own tally: 2020 drew 12.6 percent overall support (43 percent of independent shares); 2021 drew 17.25 percent overall (56 percent of independent shares); 2022 drew 17.3 percent overall (56.7 percent of independent shares).
Proxy Impact reports that Meta continued rolling out end-to-end encryption without publishing the requested report and, according to Proxy Impact, was slow to engage, sometimes taking 12 to 18 months to schedule a call with proponents.
Two separate resolutions asked Amazon to stop selling its Rekognition facial-recognition technology to government and law-enforcement agencies, and to commission an independent study of the technology's effect on civil rights and privacy.
Result: The proposal to halt sales to government agencies received 2.4 percent support; the proposal for an independent civil-rights and privacy study received 27.5 percent support.
We found no documented change in Amazon's Rekognition sales policy that resulted specifically from this 2019 vote in the sources reviewed; Amazon defended the product, saying its use was governed by its existing code of conduct.
Amazon shareholders reject facial recognition proposals, TechCrunch
The resolutions asked each company to publish a detailed report on how fake news, election interference, hate speech, and (at Facebook) violent content were spreading on its platform, and on what the company was doing to enforce its own policies against them.
With New York State Common Retirement Fund, Illinois State Treasurer Michael W. Frerichs, Baldwin Brothers Inc., Harrington Investments
Result: Facebook's content-governance proposal received about 30 percent support; a similar proposal at Alphabet received about 36 percent support.
We found no documented policy change that Facebook, Twitter, or Alphabet made specifically in response to these 2018 votes in the sources reviewed; proxy advisor ISS had recommended in favor, saying shareholders would benefit from more disclosure.
Arjuna Capital and NY State Ask Facebook to Explain Plans for Governing Content, Business Wire
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is JUST Capital's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.