At Automattic, we’re happy with our dedication to combating for the digital rights of our customers and of our work to maintain the web free and open. At the moment we’re honored to obtain one other excellent rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in its annual Who Has Your Back? report.
The EFF is a well known nonprofit group dedicated to defending digital privateness, free speech, and innovation, and their report evaluates web corporations on how effectively they safeguard person info when governments come knocking.
This continues our streak of excellent scores. We acquired 5/5 stars within the final Who Has Your Again? report that we have been included in (2015), and 5/5 stars within the EFF’s most up-to-date Who Has Your Again?: When Copyright and Trademark Bullies Threaten Free Speech report (2014).
In this year’s report, the EFF awarded stars to WordPress.com for:
- Following industry-wide finest practices.
- Promising to inform customers about regulation enforcement requests earlier than turning over information.
- Refusing to voluntarily present authorities with entry to any information about customers for regulation enforcement, intelligence gathering, or different surveillance functions.
- Combating for person privateness in Congress by taking a public place towards the re-authorization of Part 702.
- Standing as much as Nationwide Safety Letter (NSL) gag orders.
This final criterion is particularly necessary this present day. NSLs are a authorized software that give the FBI energy to demand information about odd Americans with out judicial evaluation, whereas additionally prohibiting service suppliers like Automattic from informing the general public or the customers affected by the requests. The doubtless indefinite gag orders related to NSLs fear us, and lots of others.
Fortuitously, there are new authorized procedures that enable web corporations like us to request judicial evaluation of the troublesome gag orders related to NSLs. Sadly, we will’t present specifics, however we will inform you that our coverage is to make sure that each NSL gag order imposed on us (if any) is reviewed by a choose, as now allowed by the regulation. On the numbers of NSLs that we obtain, we report essentially the most we will underneath the regulation in our transparency report, which as you can see isn’t very a lot.
Exterior of those standards, we regularly work to make our personal authorized policies and practices for safeguarding person info as user-protective as potential. Now we have stringent necessities for disclosing person information in response to authorities requests, we push again on any overreaching calls for, and we’re as clear as we’re allowed to be (throughout the regulation) concerning the requests we obtain. You possibly can take a look at our bi-annual transparency report here.
We’re very inspired that many corporations on this yr’s report scored effectively, and are thrilled to be in good firm. This isn’t a zero-sum sport; corporations can work collectively (and with the EFF!) to advance insurance policies and practices that defend web customers. We do what we will to guard our personal nook of the web, but additionally prefer to share our learnings with others who would possibly construct on or enhance what we’ve executed. Because of this our Legal Guidelines, legal forms, DMCA templates, Terms of Service, and Privacy Policies are all licensed underneath Inventive Commons licenses, and lots of of those paperwork can be found on GitHub.
We hope different corporations, particularly smaller startups, can use or take inspiration from the insurance policies we’ve constructed to additional person rights on their very own websites and platforms.
Thanks to the EFF for together with us in your report, and for your whole work to advance necessary digital rights on-line. And thanks particularly to each WordPress.com person for persevering with to belief us together with your delicate info and content material. We’ve received your again.
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