Social Purpose Report FY 2025
Proportional Data is a Washington Social Purpose Corporation. Each year we publish this report to account, in public, for our progress toward our social purposes. We believe accountability should be observable. So this document, like our platform, shows its work: what we set out to do, what we actually did, how we measure it, and where we fell short.
The purposes this report is accountable to.
Our articles of incorporation commit the company to three social purposes. Every objective, action, and measure in this report maps back to one of them.
Advancing consumer privacy protections
Increase real-world enforcement and adoption of existing privacy laws by exposing commercial under-compliance through programmatic auditing and public reporting.
Shaping AI policy toward human-centered development
Advocate for deliberate, human-centered AI development that reinforces, rather than erodes, consumer privacy.
Empowering individuals
Give people practical tools to protect their own privacy and maintain autonomy over their data and content.
Short- and long-term objectives.
For each social purpose, we state a near-term objective for this fiscal year and the long-term outcome it builds toward.
Advancing consumer privacy protections
Exposing commercial under-compliance through public, programmatic auditing.
Stand up a weekly programmatic audit of the top ~1,000 U.S. consumer websites and publish A–D compliance grades backed by a fully public methodology.
Make under-compliance visible and costly enough to drive measurable increases in real-world adoption and enforcement of existing privacy law.
Shaping AI policy toward human-centered development
Connecting privacy-respecting data practice to responsible AI.
Publish a clear, evidence-based point of view linking data minimization and consent to responsible AI, and engage in public policy and industry forums.
Help establish norms and policy under which AI development reinforces consumer privacy and amplifies human work rather than displacing it.
Empowering individuals
Turning platform findings into tools people can actually use.
Translate platform findings into plain-language guidance individuals can use to understand and reduce their own tracking exposure.
Ship and sustain free tools that give individuals durable, practical control over their data and content.
Material actions taken this year.
In our first fiscal year, the bulk of our effort went into building and operating the public compliance platform, the evidence engine behind all three purposes. The figures below are drawn directly from platform operations.
Launched weekly programmatic auditing & public grading
Built the crawler and scoring pipeline, then published A–D grades for every monitored site on two axes, consent posture and tracking intensity, exposing how much tracking fires before a visitor consents.
Made the methodology fully public
Released the complete scoring methodology so any grade can be independently scrutinized and reproduced. It is the foundation of our claim to independence.
Advanced a human-centered AI position
Began advisory engagements helping organizations adopt AI in privacy-respecting, human-amplifying ways, and used those findings to inform our public policy point of view.
Opened the data to the public
Published the compliance dashboard free of charge, so individuals and researchers can see how the sites they use handle their data.
Measures, and where we are steering them.
We hold ourselves to a small set of honest metrics. Read this as our instrument panel: where each measure stands this fiscal year, how it moved, and the target we are steering it toward next. Baselines are established this fiscal year.
| Metric | FY2025 | vs. baseline | FY2026 target |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sites audited weekly | ~1,000 | baseline | ~1,500 |
| Proper consent infrastructure | 31% | ▲ +3 pts | 38% |
| Avg. pre-consent exposure | 54 | ▼ −4 pts | 48 |
| Methodology transparency | 100% | baseline | 100% |
| Advisory engagements | 7 | baseline | 12 |
Sites with consent apparatus
A modest gain. The majority of monitored sites still lack meaningful consent apparatus.
Grade distribution observed
The largest share — "Tracks anyway" — deploy a consent platform yet still fire heavy tracking before consent. That gap between apparatus and behavior is what our reporting exists to surface.
Challenges & limitations.
We pursue our purposes with real constraints. Naming them plainly is part of the accountability this report is meant to provide, and a guard against overstating what our data can prove. Think of them as the instrument's calibration limits: the places our reading is uncertain.
Bot detection limits crawl coverage
Some sites block or fingerprint automated crawlers, or serve them different content than they serve people. Where we cannot get a representative load, we exclude the site rather than publish a misleading grade, which narrows coverage.
We observe client-side behavior only
Our crawl sees what happens in the browser. Server-side consent enforcement, back-end data sharing, and contractual data flows are not directly observable, so a site's real-world handling may be better or worse than its observable posture.
Observable posture is not a legal judgment
Our grades describe measurable tracking and consent behavior. They are not determinations of legal compliance: a site may be lawful in ways our crawl can't see, or non-compliant in ways it never surfaces.
Scale is constrained by our mission model
As a Social Purpose Corporation, infrastructure spend competes with mission spend. A weekly cadence across ~1,000 sites is a meaningful sample, not the whole web; expanding coverage responsibly takes time and funding.
Consent regimes vary by jurisdiction
Consent requirements differ across regions, and a single crawl vantage point cannot capture every regulatory context. We are explicit about where our observations apply and where they do not.
On the record.
The findings, grades, and figures in this report reflect observable tracking and consent behavior, the tracking and consent behavior we can measure by crawling each site, and are not legal determinations about any organization. Sample figures are illustrative of our first fiscal year of operation. Our complete scoring methodology is published and open to scrutiny.
This report is provided in satisfaction of the annual social-purpose reporting obligation under RCW 23B.25.150 and is made available to all shareholders and the public.