Your rights around your own information are too often ignored, said MacKinnon and her team. With large-scale data theft in the news nearly every day, consumers are starting to realize that it’s vital to understand how businesses agree to treat that data. Corporate disclosure notices and user agreements are written for regulators and tech lawyers. How can normal people make informed choices?...If censorship and privacy are simply left to corporate discretion, the results can be devastating. Yahoo settled out of court in 2007 after a human rights group sued the company for outing a Chinese dissident who was subsequently tortured...AT&T made domestic spying possible – and easy – over decades of collaboration with the National Security Agency (NSA), a partnership revealed by Edward Snowden...MacKinnon wants to see users protected by commitments to generally agreed-upon universal digital rights. But there are impediments to that progress and they aren’t all simple self-interest: legal obligations prevent tech companies from disclosing vital information...The companies investigated by the index scored universally low on one important privacy metric: how well they inform consumers whether their information has been turned over to a government...