Electronic Frontier Foundation Report Charts Companies on Next Frontier of User Privacy

“Who Has Your Back” evaluates 24 companies, awarding up to five stars in categories like “tell users about government data requests” and “publicly disclose the company’s data retention policies.” Nine companies earned stars in every category available to them: Adobe, Apple, CREDO, Dropbox, Sonic, Wickr, Wikimedia, Wordpress.com, and Yahoo. 2015’s “Who Has Your Back” marks a new era in EFF’s annual report. The best practices that we outlined in earlier years have become tech industry standards.

So in 2015, the first star includes the all the main principles from prior reports rolled into a single category called “Industry-accepted best practices.” Four new categories hold companies to an even higher standard of supporting their users’ privacy. “Every day, our digital lives require us to trust the digital services we use more and more, and consumers deserve clear and reliable information about policies and procedures that protect them,” said EFF Staff Attorney Nate Cardozo. “It’s time for all companies to take their users’ privacy seriously and reach the new standards we’ve laid out in ‘Who Has Your Back.’”