Article 12: No arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, correspondence, honour or reputation
Pivotal
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
No independent index has ever found a major technology company meeting even half of a basic digital-rights standard. Ranking Digital Rights' 2025 assessment covered 14 companies, among them Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta and Microsoft. None scored above 50 percent on privacy, governance and free-expression practices combined, and Amazon was among the lowest. Owners have acted on this repeatedly. A 2022 proposal at Alphabet for more disclosure of the company's algorithmic and ad-targeting systems won 56 percent of the shares not held by insiders, though only 19 percent overall, and a similar proposal returned in 2023. Amazon investors filed proposals for several straight years on the human rights risks of its Rekognition facial-recognition tool and its Ring and Project Nimbus surveillance products. Verizon and AT&T began publishing transparency reports on government data requests in 2013 only after ACLU-backed shareholder proposals and pressure from Trillium Asset Management and Comptroller DiNapoli's pension fund.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
The commercial data-collection, tracking, targeted-advertising and surveillance-tool businesses of a small number of technology and telecommunications companies are the direct source of most digital privacy invasions people experience, but government surveillance and law-enforcement demands operate through separate legal authority that companies alone cannot fully block.
Technology industry lobbying is one sustained factor among several in the absence of a comprehensive federal privacy law, alongside disputes over preemption and a private right of action.
2 and 2, higher of the two, gives Pivotal
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
- Ranking Digital Rights - The 2025 Big Tech Edition, Executive Summary, Ranking Digital Rights, 2025-04-28
- 2023 Alphabet, Amazon and Meta Shareholder Resolutions, Investor Alliance for Human Rights, 2023
- Big Tech & Human Rights 2024 Shareholder Proposals: Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Investor Alliance for Human Rights, 2024-03-04
- Under pressure, Verizon plans more data-request disclosures, Yahoo News / Reuters, 2013
- The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police, MIT Technology Review, 2020-06-12
- American Data Privacy and Protection Act, Wikipedia, 2023
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Publishes the annual index investors and researchers use to benchmark Big Tech companies on privacy, freedom of expression and governance; part of the World Benchmarking Alliance.
Ranking Digital Rights Index: The state of Big Tech in 2025, World Benchmarking Alliance
Filed shareholder proposals at Amazon (2022 and 2023) seeking independent due-diligence assessment of Ring and Project Nimbus for human rights harms.
Co-led the 2013 shareholder push at Verizon for transparency reporting on government data requests, alongside NY Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and Senator Edward Markey.
Under pressure, Verizon plans more data-request disclosures, Yahoo News / Reuters
Filed shareholder proposals at AT&T and Verizon in November 2013 demanding transparency reports on government data-sharing.
2 campaigns on record
Continued shareholder and advocacy pressure to stop police use of Rekognition.
Result: Amazon announced a one-year moratorium on police use of Rekognition on June 10, 2020
Amazon paused police sales of Rekognition; the moratorium was extended in subsequent years.
The two-year fight to stop Amazon from selling face recognition to the police, MIT Technology Review
Publish transparency reports detailing how often the companies share customer information with U.S. or foreign governments, and what type of information is shared.
With Trillium Asset Management
Result: proposals filed November 20, 2013 ahead of spring annual meetings
Verizon committed in 2013 to publish semi-annual transparency reports on government data requests, its first covering 2013 data.
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 Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.