Ranking Digital Rights (RDR) is a nonprofit research program that evaluates technology companies against digital-rights standards, including privacy and freedom of expression.
No Fair Play (2026)
On July 14, 2026, RDR published "No Fair Play: Mapping the 2026 World Cup Surveillance Stack," documenting at least 21 companies building surveillance infrastructure across the 16 World Cup host cities — among them Palantir, Clearview AI, Flock Safety, Axon, and Lenovo — atop $846 million in FEMA security grants to the 11 US host cities (Source: rankingdigitalrights.org). Tech Policy Press commentary on the report argued the tournament's "silent winners" are the companies normalizing surveillance (Source: techpolicy.press).
The report organizes the technologies into a five-layer stack — data harvesting at scale (video, audio detection, licence-plate readers, biometric collection at borders, transit hubs, and stadium entrances); predictive policing; communications interception via IMSI catchers; data integration and command centers; and aerial surveillance including counter-drone systems, which the report notes "carry exposure risks, potentially sweeping mobile data via radio frequency monitoring, even if they do so unintentionally." It treats the integration layer as the qualitatively distinct one, because merging systems "eliminat[es] the fragmented safeguards that existed while the systems remained separate" and "may also create permanence: data that might have been deleted in individual systems persists indefinitely in integrated databases" (No Fair Play: Mapping the 2026 World Cup Surveillance Stack (Ranking Digital Rights, July 2026)).
Thirteen of the 21 companies have received more than $15 billion in US government contracts over 18 years, and nine carry 22 human rights allegations in the Business and Human Rights Centre database; in Mexico, Seguritech has obtained the equivalent of over $3 billion in public contracts in fourteen years. The report distinguishes new World Cup contracts from pre-existing municipal relationships, noting that Axon, Clearview AI, Flock Safety, Palantir, and L3Harris were already embedded with host-city law enforcement (No Fair Play: Mapping the 2026 World Cup Surveillance Stack (Ranking Digital Rights, July 2026)).
Its central claim concerns persistence rather than deployment, evidenced across four prior mega-events: Johannesburg 2010, where the tournament "was not the beginning of surveillance… but the event was an inflection point"; Brazil 2014–16, where police forces and the military "continue to enjoy access to the technology that was bought more than ten years ago"; Qatar 2022, where "years after the tournament ended, these biometric systems remain operational"; and Paris 2024, where France's Olympic act was "the first legislation of its kind in the country that aimed to legalize algorithmic video surveillance" and the authorization was later extended past the games. For 2026, RDR "found little evidence of a clear definition of if and how the newly acquired surveillance stack would be dismounted," naming Boston, Toronto, and Vancouver as exceptions. FIFA required Human Rights Action Plans from host cities for the first time, but RDR assesses that they "fell far short," were published too close to the first match "limiting meaningful analysis and feedback," and that "very few cities considered potential privacy violations associated with the widespread use of surveillance tech" (No Fair Play: Mapping the 2026 World Cup Surveillance Stack (Ranking Digital Rights, July 2026)).
Relationships
- supports: AI and Surveillance — the No Fair Play report documents event-driven surveillance procurement
- related: Surveillance Technology, Palantir Technologies