Ranking Digital Rights

The Ranking Digital Rights initiative is important. Take a look.

Like the Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Who has your back report" these efforts analyze, report on, and rank the privacy-respecting practices of corporations and online companies.

So, what about civil society?

The Foundation Center's Glasspockets effort tracks voluntary transparency practices of foundations.

But we have no  standards and no accountability for how nonprofits and foundations collect, use, and protect our personal data - whether we are acting as donors, beneficiaries, volunteers, or fee-paying customers. When I interact with a nonprofit I do so as a private person, giving my money and my time (and increasingly my data, such as a phone number, email address, and credit card number) to them to accomplish some public-facing purpose. My trust in that organization is key - to use my money, time and data wisely and in line with their mission.

The Digital Civil Society Lab and Markets For Good Initiative at Stanford is working with several partners to run the digitalIMPACT.io project to help nonprofits and foundations think about these practices. But - we the people - will have to be the ones to set the standards by which we can trust these organizations and hold them accountable.