We are excited to announce that New Media Rights has been invited to participate in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge. The generous support of all of you donors on Giving Tuesday in 2017 has provided the needed momentum to get us to where we are now with this challenge!
Being invited shines a spotlight on our goals in the privacy realm: we're attorneys who help creators, startups, and non-profits diffuse privacy-related ticking time bombs before they explode into legal issues.
Startups, app developers, and creative projects often have to choose between either (a) having money to create and launch the project or (b) spending the $1000’s or $10,000’s for lawyers and consultants required to vet their privacy practices and draft their privacy policies. The average hourly rate of attorneys working in IP, privacy, and media law is $300-500 an hour.
That’s why privacy compliance is seen as an expensive luxury compared to customer acquisition (for businesses), launch (for app developers), or serving their communities (for nonprofits). This is why these projects choose to “roll the dice” by forgoing privacy audits until it is within their budgets. But for most organizations though, it will never be in their discretionary budget.
Through our pro-bono and low cost services, our goal is to change that, get these projects the advice they need before they launch and prevent consumer privacy violations before they happen.
Here’s how the Challenge works
Our sponsor is providing large incentives and matches that change weekly for donations we raise.
Our best shot at getting as many bonuses as possible for you to donate between March 20 – March 27 and April 3 – April 10. A little goes a long way - if you gave only $20 those weeks, it would mean that we'd receive $120 from your donation.
But donating anytime during between now and April 10th will provide a match of at least double and up to 7 times the amount that you donate. If you intended on supporting us this year, this is a great time to do it.
What your support helps us do
Any money we raise during the challenge goes to support our direct legal services for creators, non-profits, and start up projects.
For those we cannot help directly it goes to build and maintain our educational resources, like our Field Guide to Secret Audio and Video Recordings, or our guide on video releases and how to properly use and publish audio and video, or on how to identify and remove cell phone tracking software. We’ve also created a video guide on mobile device privacy.
We’re surrounded by lots of other great organizations
The Challenge highlights 20 other organizations protecting data privacy in different ways. Although we’re “competing” to raise the most money to earn a grand prize, all of the organizations involved are worth supporting and some we’ve even partnered with in the past.
Only 21 groups were chosen to participate in the challenge, and we are honored to be a part of this year’s campaign. Other organizations participating this year include Fight for the Future, Demand Progress, the Tor project, and many other organizations worth supporting that advocate for an open internet, protections for journalists, and free speech. Shout out to these organizations:
Access Now does important policy work, advocacy, and provides technical support to fight for open and secure communications.
Here at New Media Rights, when we’re not providing one to one preventative transactional legal services, we similarly focus on turning our extensive knowledge into educational resources for the public, and advocating for net neutrality, the Open Internet, and important DMCA protections.
If you support us for the policy work we do, consider supporting Access Now during the campaign as well.
Terms of Service; Didn’t Read (ToS;DR)
ToS;DR aims to help the average internet user understand what’s in terms of use and privacy policies and rates them on their consumer friendliness with a crowd-sourced labeling system crowd-sourced. It is important that the everyday internet user understand terms of use and privacy policies because they are binding contracts that affect your rights and responsibilities.
Translating complex legal subjects into plain English and crafting clear, accurate, and understandable legal agreements like terms of use and privacy policies is something does in its direct services and educational work everyday.
If our work making the law easy to understand to average internet users is something that you plan to support us for, consider supporting Terms of Service; Didn’t Read as part of this challenge as well.
The Calyx Institute is a nonprofit education and research organization devoted to studying, testing and developing and implementing privacy technology to promote free speech and privacy rights. Building systems that online service providers can use to implement privacy controls into their platforms is an important step towards “privacy by design,” a privacy framework that builds privacy into the design, operation and management of information technologies rather than after the fact.
Here at New Media Rights, we work to help online businesses and app developers take preventative measures to protect user and customer data, including counseling on the importance of adhering to “privacy by design” principles at the outset of a business.
Advocating for privacy by design prevents privacy violations before they happen, so consider supporting the Calyx Institute during the campaign.
Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC)
Also located in San Diego, PRC is a nonprofit consumer education and advocacy organization that provides creates educational publications, and advocates for consumer-friendly policy. PRC’s work engaging, educating and empowering individuals to protect their privacy is important now more than ever, as our changing technology continues to change the way we interact with each other and other companies.
Like PRC, New Media Rights strives to be a local resource for the public in San Diego. If you support New Media Rights as a useful safety net in the local community consider supporting PRC as well during the challenge.
Value legal services for internet users and creators? Support them. 
