Nathalie Marechal was Co-Director of the Privacy & Data Project at CDT, managing projects related to privacy and data protection in the context of artificial intelligence policy, online advertising, disability rights, workers’ rights, and virtual, augmented and extended reality. She also sits on the Board of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.
Prior to joining CDT in January 2023, she was the Policy Director at Ranking Digital Rights, where she led RDR’s engagement with governments, international and multilateral organizations, civil society groups, and academia, with the aim of holding companies accountable for their duty to respect human rights. She also managed the researchers and advocates who produce RDR’s signature scorecards, work with global partners to adapt RDR’s methodology to new issue areas and local contexts, and engage directly with companies and investors.
In 2020, Nathalie was the lead author for RDR’s “It’s the Business Model” report series, which builds on her 2018 Motherboard op-ed, “Targeted Advertising is Ruining the Internet and Breaking the World,” to argue that disinformation, hate speech, and other “information harms” associated social media platforms are rooted in the surveillance capitalism business model. The report series calls on governments to focus reform efforts on data protection and corporate governance, rather than attempting to regulate online speech. Previously, Nathalie led RDR’s methodology development process to expand the Corporate Accountability Index to include new company types and issue areas, notably targeted advertising and algorithmic systems such as the ones used for content moderation. Nathalie’s work on targeted advertising and its discontents has been credited with helping shift the national policy conversation away from a singular focus on content moderation and toward a more holistic approach to Big Tech accountability.
Nathalie earned a BA and MA from American University, and a PhD in Communication from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Her dissertation, “‘Use Signal, Use Tor’ ? : The Political Economy of Digital Rights Technology,” examined the relationship between the transnational social movement for human rights online and the US Internet Freedom Agenda through an ethnography of the “freedom technologists” behind popular secure messaging applications (Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram) and censorship circumvention software (Tor, Psiphon). Her work has been published by the International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Democracy, the Global Commission on Internet Governance, Media and Communication, Global Voices, Motherboard, and Slate.
