“This position is a perfect fit for me,” explained alumna Ilana Ullman (MAPP ’16). “In addition to working on issues I'm passionate about, I'm excited at the opportunity to live and work in Budapest and to continue to be a part of the CEU community.” Ullman has returned to Budapest as a policy and communications analyst with Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), a project she has been working on since October 2016.
RDR produces a Corporate Accountability Index that ranks the world’s largest ICT (information and communications technology) companies based on their public commitment to user’s freedom of expression and privacy rights. The project was launched by Rebecca MacKinnon, prominent digital rights activist, co-founder of Global Voices Online, and author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom (2012).
RDR is housed at New America’s Open Technology Institute in Washington D.C. with team members working remotely at partner organizations in the United States and Europe, including at SPP’s Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS). CMDS currently hosts two RDR team members as fellows.
“I started out working for RDR in our Washington, D.C. office – in part because that’s where I was living when I was hired and also because there are a lot of relevant policy events and discussions going on in the D.C. area,” says Ullman. Being based in Washington, D.C. also made it easier for her to attend two internet policy-related conferences in Latin America last fall - the Freedom Online Coalition Conference in San Jose, Costa Rica in October, and the Internet Governance Forum in Guadalajara, Mexico in December.
Ullman’s current responsibilities include facilitating RDR’s engagement with different companies. “I’m compiling preliminary results from our research, reaching out to companies, participating in calls in which the companies can give more detailed feedback, and evaluating their written responses to determine if they potentially merit a score change,” she says. Ullman is also writing blog posts, managing RDR’s Twitter account, and helping to plan the communications strategy for the 2017 Corporate Accountability Index, which will be announced in March. Twenty-eight researchers in 11 countries are contributing to this year’s Index.
“This is an extremely important topic that is not well understood. Many people don’t realize what types of information companies are collecting about them – and what they do with that information,” says Amy Brouillette, research and editorial manager of the Ranking Digital Rights project and a CMDS resident research fellow. Brouillette and her colleagues are hoping that the Index will cause companies to be more transparent and provide users with critical information that will enable them to make more informed decisions about how they interact with technology. “Collectively, the companies we look at play a significant role in the lives of billions of people around the world, and so it's crucial that internet users are aware of how their human rights are - or are not - being respected and protected ” says Ullman.