Tech sector transparency & the Global South

In the last year alone, the Resource Centre added 1,447 articles, company responses and other resources to its open-access database of materials on human rights and the technology sector. We requested responses to specific allegations of human rights abuse from technology companies 161 times. Among the issues captured are allegations related to surveillance of human rights defenders, journalists and civil society organisations, violations of users’ rights to privacy and freedom of expression, online gender violence, indiscriminate spread of disinformation and harmful content, children sexual exploitation, labour rights violations, among many others.

Over half (54%) of the invitations to respond were related to human rights harms in the Global South. However, the response rate from technology companies operating in these countries was below 45%.

This year’s update to the Resource Centre’s Technology Company Dashboards seeks to shine a light on precisely these issues, tracking and contextualising companies’ responses to allegations of abuse and commitments by technology firms across the world to improve transparency and corporate accountability by the sector. Each Dashboard provides a snapshot of tech company’s human rights profile, including: company information, details of human rights allegations, lawsuits over alleged human rights violations, the most frequently associated rights issues, and available benchmark scores from civil society initiatives that we have collected about each company. This year, we added 40 new companies to our Dashboard coverage, focusing specifically on companies operating in the Global South, to bring the total number of Tech Company Dashboards to 121 companies across a range of industries, including telecommunications, social media, e-commerce, data brokers, among others. Eighteen of the newly added companies are firms operating in Africa.