2022 Digital Rights Compliance Ranking: Moving Toward Transparency
Experts from the Digital Rating project (by DRC Group), in partnership with Roskomsvoboda, have released a new Ranking of Digital Rights Compliance among popular Runet web services.
Scope of the Study
The study focused on:
- Social networks: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Moi Mir, Pikabu, Habr, Yandex.Zen, LiveJournal
- E-commerce platforms: Yandex.Market, Avito, Ozon, Wildberries
- IT company ecosystems: Yandex, VK, Sber
Researchers evaluated company activities across six criteria:
- Transparency
- Consumer rights
- Privacy
- Freedom of information
- Corporate social responsibility
- Major data leaks
The analysis included official company websites (including technical subdomains), parent/group company resources, official blogs, and open sources such as media outlets.
Leaders: Yandex.Zen, Yandex.Market, and Yandex
The top three in 2022 were:
- Yandex.Zen
- Yandex.Market
- Yandex
Interestingly, Yandex as the parent company was initially in first place, but due to a data leak in March, it dropped to third, allowing its individual services to take the lead. Pikabu, for the same reason, fell from third to fifth place. Habr took fourth, having led the ranking in 2020 and 2021 as a pioneer among Russian services publishing transparency reports.
“Despite the leak, Yandex ecosystem services remained at the top of the ranking thanks to other significant positive changes,” said Anna Karnaukhova, a Roskomsvoboda lawyer and one of the study’s authors.
Specifically, Yandex introduced:
- A transparency report covering July 2019 to June 2021
- Information on the number of search result removals for links listed in Roskomnadzor’s registry of banned sites
- The ability to download an archive of user data from various Yandex services
- A statement in its Business and Corporate Ethics Rules that it follows the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, ILO Conventions, and UN Global Compact Principles
“These positive changes initially helped Yandex become the ranking leader,” Karnaukhova added.
Key Findings and Challenges
A major shortcoming, as in previous years, is the lack of transparency reports. Only Pikabu, Habr, and Yandex publish such reports. Even then, they lack breakdowns by categories of requested user data, and Yandex’s report does not cover all its services.
Additionally, most companies’ User Agreements and Privacy Policies are lengthy and sometimes written in complex language, even though they contain important information, Karnaukhova noted.
“On the positive side, most companies fully or partially disclose what data they collect about users and how they obtain it,” she concluded.
Feedback from Habr
Alexey Shevelev, Head of User Relations at Habr, told Roskomsvoboda that they worked closely with the ranking’s authors to clarify each criterion and avoid misunderstandings.
“Some points were minor — we could have easily scored more by making quick changes, but that would have been unsportsmanlike. We exchanged experiences, discussed how different projects implement certain points, which gave us food for thought and helped adjust our future plans,” Shevelev shared.
He said the platform considers its results “not very good” and will try to improve its position next year by addressing existing gaps: “Specs for some features are already written and waiting to be implemented.”
Read more about each company here.
Methodology
The research process included the following steps:
- First expert inventories publicly available documents for each service
- First expert rates each indicator
- Second and third experts validate the results
- Additional information requested from the companies
- “Horizontal review”: comparing company results to ensure a unified and objective approach
To draw conclusions, the team closely examined Terms of Service (User Agreement), Privacy Policies, other public documents, and open sources. Some issues regarding consumer rights and privacy were also tested in practice.
When reviewing documents, experts focused on public commitments related to users’ rights to seek, receive, and distribute information, as well as privacy rights.
“If in the past the ranking felt somewhat general, this year there were almost no such issues: the evaluation was based on a rather impressive checklist,” Shevelev noted.
This year, experts added new sections:
- Corporate social responsibility — assessing voluntary participation of web resources in social, environmental, and economic development
- Major data leaks — analyzing large-scale user data leaks over the calendar year, their consequences, and how companies addressed them
As noted above, the second point significantly affected Yandex’s position this year.
The Importance of the Ranking
Data leaks, like the one at Yandex, clearly demonstrate the importance of such research. However, the ranking’s goal is not only to highlight problems but also to help solve them. The ranking offers companies and web services a roadmap for improvement and positive change. Such changes can make online businesses safer and increase user loyalty.
“Over the past three years, companies have definitely improved, taking our advice and recommendations into account as they strive to earn user loyalty,” Karnaukhova summarized.
Each year, IT companies and social networks play an increasingly important role in people’s lives, says Sarkis Darbinyan, head of legal practice at Roskomsvoboda and one of the study’s authors. According to him, businesses should aim to maximize profits while following the basic rules of society, both those enshrined in law and those reflected in ethical norms.
“Our relationships with IT companies are built on trust. But can we fully trust them? What do companies promise regarding our rights, and how do they actually fulfill those promises? To answer these questions, and to see how IT companies disclose their interactions with government agencies, we create this ranking. Its results allow society to look deeper into how companies ensure digital human rights, ultimately fostering trust based on facts, not blind faith,” the lawyer concluded.
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