World's biggest tech companies get failing grade on data-privacy rights

The world’s top tech companies are failing when it comes to privacy and freedom of expression, according to the most comprehensive assessment to date of their user agreement policies. Tech firms including US giants Facebook, Google and Microsoft, Europe’s top mobile companies Vodafone and Orange, China’s Tencent, and South Korea’s Daum Kakao (which makes the 140 million-user-strong KakaoTalk) were among the public companies surveyed in an ongoing project called Ranking Digital Rights. All of the firms failed to offer their users basic disclosures about privacy and censorship, according to the survey, which was conducted by the New America Foundation thinktank. One didn’t even provide user agreements in the proper language. “There are no ‘winners’,” said the group in its executive summary. “Even companies in the lead are falling short.”