The Importance of Being Transparent: Looking at the ICT Companies’ Transparency Reports Through the Prism of the NSA Surveillance Leak (original) (raw)
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Drawing on the debates in the ongoing ESRC- funded seminar series (2015-2016), ‘Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements: Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust’ (DATA- PSST!), we identify stances on transparency in the post-Snowden leak era held by partici- pants. Participants comprise academics from diverse disciplines, and stakeholders involved with transparency issues. We advance an origi- nal transparency typology; and develop the metaphor of the Visibility Slider to highlight the core aspect of privacy conceived in terms of control, management, norms and protocol. Together, the typology and metaphor illumi- nate the abstract, complex condition of con- temporary surveillance, enabling clarification and assessment of transparency arrangements.
Drawing on the philosophy of privacy and ongoing ESRC-funded seminar series (2015-16), Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements: Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust (DATA-PSST!), we identify stances on transparency in the post-Snowden leak era held by participants. Participants comprise academics from diverse disciplines, and stakeholders involved with transparency issues. We advance an original transparency typology; and develop the metaphor of the Visibility Slider to highlight the core aspect of privacy conceived in terms of control, management, norms and protocol. Together, the typology and metaphor illuminate the abstract, complex condition of contemporary surveillance, enabling clarification and assessment of transparency arrangements.
2015
Drawing on the debates in the ongoing ESRCfunded seminar series (2015-2016), ‘Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements: Privacy, Security, Surveillance, Trust’ (DATAPSST!), we identify stances on transparency in the post-Snowden leak era held by participants. Participants comprise academics from diverse disciplines, and stakeholders involved with transparency issues. We advance an original transparency typology; and develop the metaphor of the Visibility Slider to highlight the core aspect of privacy conceived in terms of control, management, norms and protocol. Together, the typology and metaphor illuminate the abstract, complex condition of contemporary surveillance, enabling clarification and assessment of transparency arrangements.
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Over the last decade, transparency reports have been adopted by most large information technology companies. These reports provide important information on the requests tech companies receive from state actors around the world and the ways they respond to these requests, including what content the companies remove from platforms they own. In theory, such reports shall make inner workings of companies more transparent, in particular with respect to their collaboration with state actors. They shall also allow users and external entities (e.g., researchers or watchdogs) to assess to what extent companies adhere to their own policies on user privacy and content moderation as well as to the principles formulated by global entities that advocate for the freedom of expression and privacy online such as the Global Network Initiative or Santa Clara Principles. However, whether the current state of transparency reports actually is conducive to meaningful transparency remains an open question. In this paper, we aim to address this through a critical comparative analysis of transparency reports using Santa Clara Principles 2.0 (SCP 2.0) as the main analytical framework. Specifically, we aim to make three contributions: first, we conduct a comparative analysis of the types of data disclosed by major tech companies and social media platforms in their transparency reports. The companies and platforms analyzed include Google (incl. YouTube), Microsoft (incl. its subsidiaries Github and LinkedIn), Apple, Meta (prev. Facebook), TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit and Amazon (incl. subsidiary Twitch). Second, we evaluate to what degree the released information complies with SCP 2.0 and how it aligns with different purposes of transparency. Finally, we outline recommendations that could improve the level of transparency within the reports and beyond, and contextualize our recommendations with regard to the Digital Services Act (DSA) that received the final approval of the European Council in October 2022.
THE INFORMATION SOCIETY, 2021
In this study, we seek to understand the considerations of young adults who chose to continue their active engagement with Facebook even after Cambridge Analytica scandal laid bare the mechanics of economic surveillance. We base our analysis on two sets of in-depth face-to-face interviews we conducted with young adults in Israel—26 before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which we had already conducted for a study on privacy, and 24 after the scandal erupted. To analyze our respondent’s rationales, we employ Boltanski and Th evenot’s regimes of justification framework. Before the scandal, our respondents largely saw privacy as a commodity, a tradeoff made by the individual—information disclosure in exchange for free personalized digital services. However, there were some respondents who rejected the notion of privacy as a commodity and advanced an alternative perspective that considers it to be a human right. After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was a marked shift away from understanding of privacy as a right, which our respondents neither saw an unconditional right nor something enforceable by regulators. Instead, they largely saw economic surveillance as something inherent to the digital world, which one needs to accept if one wants to participate in it.
Between transparency and surveillance: Politics of the secret
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The recent wave of whistleblowers and cyber-dissidents, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, has declared war against surveillance. In this context, transparency is presented as an attainable political goal that can be delivered in flesh and bones by spectacular and quasi-messianic moments of disclosure. The thesis of this article is that, despite its progressive promise, the project of releasing classified documents is in line with the Orwellian cold war trope of Big Brother rather than with the complex geography of surveillance today. By indicting the US federal government as the principal agent of surveillance, the ‘logic of the leak’ obfuscates that today’s surveillance is conducted mostly by the private sector in the form of dataveillance. What should we think, then, of this new fetish of transparency? Is it a symptom of the castigation of a desire for surveillance, the wish to be constantly observed and closely inspected? I claim that the meaning of the ‘expository society’,...