Center for Digital Democracy
The Center for Digital Democracy (CDD) is a nonprofit public interest organization that advocates for the rights and responsibilities of citizens and consumers in a rapidly changing digital environment. Established in 2001, it traces its roots to its parent organization, the Center for Media Education, which was active from 1991 to 2003. CDD is based in Washington, D.C., but its efforts online transcend any single region or locality in their impact.
In general, CDD operates as a media watchdog, working on behalf of individuals to whom the media market goods and services and about whom the media collect information. CDD staff alert the American public to the perils of digital information and communication technologies. They also file complaints on behalf of U.S. consumers, challenging companies and corporations to abide by the laws and rules applying to consumer protection and fair commerce.
As its founding date suggests, CDD is a product of the digital age and its distinctive forms of information society. CDD pays particularly close attention to the ways in which individuals experience both benefits and harms through their use of digital platforms, which enable companies to research and reach users through both overt and covert means. Through CDDâs efforts, society is reminded to ask important questions regarding digital technologies. For example, who governs the Internet? Who owns the rights to information collected in electronic commerce? How does the societal power exercised by media entities from the New York Times to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission affect the democratic process, whether for good or ill?
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Safeguarding Consumer Privacy
Jeff Chester, a critic of mass media practice and ethics, was CDDâs founder and has served as its executive director. He has a significant history as an activist and is known for questioning the ways in which businesses conduct their work and interact with either current or prospective customers. Chester is the author of the 2007 book Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy. Particularly since founding CDD, Chester has advocated for stricter regulation of e-commerce and more rigorous protection of consumer information. He has also challenged proposed mergers and acquisitions that would further consolidate the control of new and social media in corporations, conglomerates, and monopolies.
Along with Chester, staff members at CDD have pursued several key issues in terms of U.S. media, including threats to online privacy, irresponsible marketing to youth, and the hazards of big data. For CDD, these matters are not merely matters of consequence in terms of the conduct of commerce. Rather, the immersive nature of the digital era poses threats to the integrity and self-determination of media users. For Chester and his colleagues, these dangers raise major concerns about the countryâs ability to maintain one of the cornerstones of democracy: an informed and engaged citizenry.
CDD may be best known as guardians of consumer privacy, especially while online. Both the rapid growth of the Internet and its often unrecognized capacities to document the activities and detect the preferences of users result in an increasingly perilous experience for consumers. CDD has taken various actions and filed complaints about social networking sites, Internet search engines, Internet providers, and other media titans. It applies a steady pressure against all those who might mislead or manipulate users through technologies whose capacities the public craves but may not fully understand. Accordingly, another prong of CDDâs approach to such hazards is to equip the public with information about the dangers, as well as to coach them in techniques to shield themselves from invasions of privacy and improper business practices.
Reducing Hazards to Youth
Perhaps the most potentially vulnerable users of digital media are children, tweens, and teens. While adults have the option to inform themselves about the perils of electronic environments and transactions, youth ought not to be expected to exercise the same discretion. For that reason, young people may require special safeguards to ensure that they do not suffer adverse long-term consequences from their engagement with mass, social, and new media. Both because they are minors, and because they do not recall a predigital age (rather, they are digital natives or lifelong users), young people may not be equipped to defend their rights or question their treatment via electronic media.
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On this basis, the CDD monitors particularly closely media marketing targeted to children, tweens, and teens. Studies conducted by the Center for Media Education in the 1990s helped prompt Federal Trade Commission hearings into data collection in interactive TV, eventually leading to the enactment of the Childrenâs Online Privacy Protection Act (1998). In a well-publicized early complaint, CDD charged Nickelodeon and PlayFirst with violations of that act. CDD contended that their jointly issued game called SpongeBob Diner Dash collected childrenâs personal data without first securing parental consent.
Managing Data Risk
Regardless of the age of media users, few individuals appreciate the many tacit ways in which their actions and transactions in electronic environments may subject them to risk. Data collection, consumer tracking, behavioral advertising, targeted marketing, and sale of personal information are just a few of the practices that CDD analyzes and contests. As the platforms of mass media shift and diversify, CDD turns its attention to an increasing number of new digital environments. CDD also monitors gaming and applications for mobile devices. Regardless of what media platform might be involved in a given action, CDD brings social or legal pressure to bear in protecting consumers from unscrupulous business practices.
Through advocacy for the public good, the CDD works to safeguard and strengthen the protections in place for U.S. citizens and consumers. Using tactics ranging from formal complaint to public exposĂ©, CDD seeks to limit or reduce the harm that befalls the American publicâboth as consumers and as members of the electorateâowing to their vulnerability as new media and/or social media users.
The original version of this article was published by SAGE Publications in The SAGE International Encyclopedia of Mass Media and Society.