A new $6 million gift from Craig Newmark Philanthropies will help Consumer Reports boost its research into the ways technology products can threaten the privacy of consumers.
The contribution will fund a new program called Digital Lab. It will add to the planned fundraising goal of about $25 million through 2020.
Consumer Reports CEO Marta Tellado said the lab will focus on testing new smart products, apps, and services, including printers, routers, cars, and password managers.
“Putting consumers first in a world of big tech and relentless data, privacy abuses, hacks, and breaches is the consumer challenge of our time,” she said, adding that consumer-protection laws from the 1980s and ’90s don’t adequately protect people “in the new digital reality.”
A digital advisory council made up of technology experts, journalists, and academics will help guide the new project, which will focus on data transparency and accountability. Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder who served on the Board of Directors at Consumer Reports for nearly 10 years before his term ended in 2017, will become honorary chair of the council.
While members of the council have not yet been announced, Newmark said he’s looking for people “who are smart about consumer protection when it comes to digital privacy and cybersecurity.” He’s also interested in seeing the Digital Lab conduct more research on antibiotics and diseases that come up through the industrial food chain. Excessive antibiotic use can increase resistant bacteria, making the antibiotics less effective for both animals and humans.
Recurring Support
This isn’t the first major gift from Newmark to Consumer Reports. In 2017, he joined forces with the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to invest a total of $2.8 million to launch Digital Standard. Among other things, that project found that some smart TVs were vulnerable to hacking, which led Samsung to fix a security flaw.
Other Digital Standard research focused on the women’s fertility app Glow, which recorded intimate details about women and their health, including their history of abortions. Another report with ProPublica showed how car-insurance companies charged higher rates in minority neighborhoods.
Tellado said she expects that Digital Lab to continue to reach new audiences. A separate Consumer Reports effort is Consumer 101, a television show that airs on NBC and Telemundo and streams on Hulu and YouTube. The show recently won a Parents’ Choice Award.
“We’re trying to create very savvy consumers and hold [technology companies] accountable,” she said. “We do see results when you expose threats and when you create a dynamic in the marketplace for competition around standards that will put consumers first. We need the tools to do it now.”
