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2017
Truthful information has been an important topic on transparency agendas. A considerable amount of work has been done on this theme, but transparency practices remain a challenge to society. This chapter presents the concept of transparency and discusses challenges and opportunities for research giving an overview about Information Systems applications in this area and progress that has been made in recent years.
Ethics and information technology, 2009
2013 Third Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust, 2013
As the amount of users' information collected and exchanged on the Internet is growing, so are, consequently, the users' concerns that their privacy might be violated. Some studies have shown that a large number of users avoid engaging in online services due to privacy concerns. It has been suggested that increased transparency of privacy related mechanisms may promote users' trust. This paper reviews the relationship between users' privacy concerns, transparency enhancing and privacy enhancing mechanisms on the one hand, and users' trust on the other, based on the existing literature. Our literature review demonstrates that previous studies have produced inconsistent results, implying this relationship should be reexamined in future work. Impact of higher transparency on users' trust has been insufficiently studied. Current research seems to suggest that the increase of the understanding of privacy issues increases importance of privacy for trust. Use of privacy enhancing mechanisms by service provider also seems to promote the trust, but this may only hold when these mechanisms are understood by the user. A need for tools that would provide users with this kind of knowledge has also been repeatedly recognized. Additionally, this paper provides an overview and description of the currently available transparency enhancing tools. To the best of our knowledge, no such overview has been available to this end. We demonstrate that the majority of tools promote awareness. Most of them attempt to provide a better understanding of privacy policies, or provide insight in the third party tracking behavior. Two tools have been identified that provide some insight in the collected user's data. No tool providing specific information on, or access to, processing logic has been identified.
Proceedings of the IEEE
The question of "how far" technologies and business models of the web should go into collecting personal data of unassuming, or at best moderately informed citizens, appears to be one of the most timely questions of our times. Indeed, whenever we read a news article, "like" a page on a social network, or "check in" to a popular spot, our digital trace collected, processed, fused, and traded among myriads of tracking, analytics, advertising, and marketing companies becomes an ever more accurate descriptor of our lives, our beliefs, our desires, our likes and dislikes. The resulting revenue from marketing and advertising activities driven by the digital traces of millions of people is what funds the free online services we have come to rely upon. In this opinion article, I will lay down my thoughts around data transparency and its role in ongoing data protection and privacy debates. The material draws upon my experience from conducting research in the area over the last six plus years, running the Data Transparency Lab's Grant Program 1 in 2015, 2016, and 2017, and attending several computer science, policy, and marketing and advertising events. The objective of the article is to discuss the possibility and the likelihood of data transparency acting as an important positive catalyser of
IEEE Access
Over a decade since transparency was introduced as a first-class concept in computing, transparency is still an emerging concept that is quite poorly understood. Also, despite existing research contributions, transparency is yet to be incorporated into the software engineering practice, and the promise it holds remains unfulfilled. Although there is evidence of increasing stakeholders' demand for software and process transparency, the realization of such demand is yet to be fully witnessed within the software engineering practice. There is a need to uncover transparency and how it has so far been conceptualized, operationalized, and challenges faced. We applied a systematic literature review method in search of articles published between January 2006 and March 2022. This study reports a systematic review of the explicit conceptualization and application of transparency in 18 articles out of a total of 162 selected for review. Our study found that transparency remains an under-researched non-functional quality requirement concept, especially as it impacts information and software systems development. Of the 18 articles reviewed, only three studies representing 16.67% conceptualized transparency in software development and focused on the transparency of software artifacts. The remaining 83.33% of studies conceptualized transparency in information systems, focusing on general information and fully functional information systems. Transparency is yet to be fully explored from a theoretical gathering point of view and as a non-functional indicator of software quality hence its slow adoption and incorporation into mainstream software practice. Apart from providing a catalog of transparency factors that stakeholders can use to evaluate transparency achievement, the paper proposed a roadmap to enhance transparency implementation and also provides future research directions.
Global Environmental Politics, 2010
The growing attention to transparency is not an accidental and fashionable wave, soon to be replaced by another timely topic in environmental governance. Transparency is here to stay and to further develop in environmental politics, as it piggy-backs on a number of wider social developments. In assessing the achievements of transparency to date, this article concludes that it has on balance been positive for democracy. But this overall positive past assessment does not automatically extend into the future, as new challenges (and thus new research agendas) lie ahead. The growing importance attached to transparency in environmental politics ensures that it becomes a central object of power struggles, with uncertain outcomes in terms of democracy as well as environmental effects. Markets and states seek to capture transparency arrangements for their own goals, which may not necessarily be in line with assumed normative linkages between transparency, democracy and participation.
2009
The cliché is not quite right: Information by itself is not power. But it is an essential first step to the exercise of political and economic power. Opening up flows of information changes who can do what. That is why there are few more important struggles in the world today than the battle over who gets to know what. But the debate over transparency and access to information is more than a power struggle. It is also a war of ideas about what transparency is good for and when secrecy may better serve the public interest. This is no trivial or arcane debate. The arguments for and against transparency reflect fundamental issues about the nature of democracy, good governance, economic efficiency, and social justice, at levels ranging from villages to global institutions. The debate is encapsulated in part in competing words: " transparency " and " the right to know " versus " privacy " and " national security. " It is showing up in a host of ski...
2017
Introduction: The approval of the Transparency Law in Spain in 2013, along with concern about corruption, good governance and accountability has led to a significant increase in studies on transparency of administrations in recent years. Methods: The objective of this article is to expose the different methodological complexities in order to analyse the transparency of the contents published by the public administrations in aspects such as the definition of transparency itself, the object of study, the users or the recipients. Results: A model of analysis of the transparency of the webs of the municipalities is presented: the Infoparticipa project. The methodology we present is based on innovative tools that have established a map of local transparency in Spain. Discussion and conclusions: The Infoparticipa Map has transcended the academic field showing its social utility by allowing the improvement of the information published in the webs.
2019
Algorithmic transparency is currently invoked for two separate purposes: to improve trust in systems and to provide insight into problems like algorithmic bias. Although transparency can help both problems, recent results suggest these goals cannot be accomplished simultaneously by the same transparency implementation. Providing enough information to diagnose algorithmic bias will overwhelm users and lead to poor experiences. On the other hand, scaffolding user mental models with selective transparency will not provide enough information to audit these systems for fairness. This paper argues that if we want to address both problems we must separate two distinct aspects of transparency: explainability and auditability. Explainability improves user experience by facilitating mental model formation and building user trust. It provides users with sufficient information to form accurate mental models of system operation. Auditability is more exhaustive; providing third-parties with the a...
Communications of AIS, 2019
The use of personal data and algorithms for making recommendations and decisions is growing. There are concerns that this use is having a negative impact on individual privacy and poses a risk to individuals and society. In response, there are calls for greater algorithmic transparency; that is, for organizations to be more public and open about their use of personal data and algorithms. To better understand algorithmic transparency for this tutorial, we reviewed the literature and interviewed 10 experts. The study identified the factors that are influencing algorithmic transparency, the Association for Computing Machinery’s principles for ensuring that personal data and algorithms are used fairly, and recommendations for company best practices. The study also supports speculation about how personal data and algorithms may be used in the future.
Telecommunications Policy, 2023
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.
Public Sector Economics
With applications in financial, regulatory, monetary, and fiscal policy, and with the World Bank, IMF, OECD, and many other NGOs advising on best practices, fiscal transparency has become a major theme of contemporary research in political economy and public administration. It was not always so. Even though the connection between transparency and corruption prevention was understood by the ancient Athenians, the connection with democracy at least since 1689, and the importance of bookkeeping and auditing practices in economic development even earlier, there was little academic interest in the causes and consequences of transparency. An important stimulus to academic thought was Holmström (1979), with 10,000+ citations. One could weave a narrative through three subsequent streams of analysis-institutions, corruption, and debt-in academia with real-world developments from Watergate, the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the founding of Transparency International, some aggressive lobbying by US firms, to the FCPA Amendments and OECD Convention of 1997-98. However, even though the 1990s saw increased attention to information, opportunism, and verification and the path-breaking publication of Mauro (1995, also 10,000+ citations), there was essentially no mention of "transparency". It is no longer so. Today, according to the US Department of State (2017), fiscal transparency is a critical element of effective public financial management, one that helps in building market confidence and underpins economic sustainability. Fiscal transparency also fosters greater government accountability by providing a window into government budgets for citizens, helping them to hold their leadership accountable and facilitating better-informed public debate. These pronouncements may be somewhat exaggerated, but around the literature one finds similar claims, that transparency promotes not only stability, sustainability, and credibility, but even trust. These claims have some truth in them, but overall the evidence in support of them is mixed. Our goal in this note is to look at twenty years of transparency research and highlight what is known and what is new. james e. alt: twenty years of transparency research public sector economics 43 (1) 5-13 (2019) james e. alt: twenty years of transparency research public sector economics 43 (1) 5-13 (2019)
Transparency seems to represent a solution to many ethic issues generated by systems that collect implicit data from users to model the user themselves based on programmed criteria. However, making such systems transparent – besides being a major technical challenge-risks raising more issues than it solves, actually reducing the user's ability to protect themselves while trying to put them in control. Are transparent systems only a chimera, which provides a seemingly useful information pastiche while failing to make sense upon closer examination? Scholars from ethics and cognitive science share their thoughts on how to achieve genuine transparency and the value of transparency.
Advanced Methodologies and Technologies in Business Operations and Management
Transparency is one of the most frequent words in the contemporary public discourse, due to the growing demand for organizational transparency from the many stakeholders, which include shareholders, national and international watchdog organizations, the mass media, and influential bloggers. For instance, since shareholders invest money in corporations, they require financial disclosure, the exposure of future strategies, and the revelation of the corporation's decision-making processes. Therefore, the chapter has as its main objective to present the main concepts related to organizational transparency, and its dimensions, according to a review of literature and competing models of transparency. The chapter aims to contrast the importance and implications of transparency for the society and organizations. The chapter also aims to present a research agenda on the topic and present how the society is requiring an ever-higher level of transparency of all kinds of organizations.
Vincent August & Fran Osrecki (Hrsg.)(2020), Der Transparenz-Imperativ: Normen, Strukturen, Praktiken. Wiesbaden: Springer VS. pp. 1-34., 2020
In Western societies, transparency has become an imperative and almost unquestionable norm. In this opening chapter, we provide an overview of social scientific debates about transparency. First, we trace the idea of transparency historically in order to contextualize past and present transparency imperatives. We start with the utilitarian tradition initiated by Jeremy Bentham and argue that transparency employs a mechanism of surveillance, formaliza-tion, and standardization that is supposed to transform insecurities into security and efficiency. This modernist legacy reaches into contemporary visions of transparency, for instance in institutional economics, new public management, or in current debates on big data. In a second step, we discuss the unintended consequences of these recent transparency imperatives. Based on a literature review, we show that transparency often does not achieve its self-proclaimed goals, as its rationale and practices produce unintended structural effects, such as organizational inefficiency, massive bureaucratization, and even intranspar-ency. Building on these results, we propose a comparative approach for future social scientific research on transparency, outlining new frontiers and topics.
Transparency is an increasingly prominent area of research that offers valuable insights for organizational studies. However, conceptualizations of transparency are rarely subject to critical scrutiny and thus their relevance remains unclear. In most accounts, transparency is associated with the sharing of information and the perceived quality of the information shared. This narrow focus on information and quality, however, overlooks the dynamics of organizational transparency. To provide a more structured conceptualization of organizational transparency, this article unpacks the assumptions that shape the extant literature, with a focus on three dimensions: conceptualizations, conditions, and consequences. The contribution of the study is twofold: (a) On a conceptual level, we provide a framework that articulates two paradigmatic positions underpinning discussions of transparency, verifiability approaches and performativity approaches; (b) on an analytical level, we suggest a novel future research agenda for studying organizational transparency that pays attention to its dynamics, paradoxes, and performative characteristics.
Human Relations, 2020
In this article, we advance research on transparency by developing and validating a measure based on recent theoretical insights about its dimensionality. We find that transparency-defined as the perceived quality of information-is a three-dimensional construct consisting of perceived information disclosure, clarity, and accuracy. Evidence shows items associated with these dimensions can be aggregated into a single transparency construct. We also find that transparency (as an aggregate construct) is distinct from neighboring constructs such as informational justice and capable of predicting perceptions of the source's trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, and integrity). Finally, we find evidence of measurement invariance between two commonly used referents of analysis, yielding confidence in the application of the proposed measure
Business & Society, 2016
Transparency is an increasingly prominent area of research that offers valuable insights for organizational studies. However, conceptualizations of transparency are rarely subject to critical scrutiny and thus their relevance remains unclear. In most accounts, transparency is associated with the sharing of information and the perceived quality of the information shared. This narrow focus on information and quality, however, overlooks the dynamics of organizational transparency. To provide a more structured conceptualization of organizational transparency, this article unpacks the assumptions that shape the extant literature, with a focus on three dimensions: conceptualizations, conditions, and consequences. The contribution of the study is twofold: (a) On a conceptual level, we provide a framework that articulates two paradigmatic positions underpinning discussions of transparency, verifiability approaches and performativity approaches; (b) on an analytical level, we suggest a novel...
ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 2015
On November 20 and 21 2014, Telefonica I+D hosted the Data Transparency Lab ("DTL") Kickoff Workshop on Personal Data Transparency and Online Privacy at its headquarters in Barcelona, Spain. This workshop provided a forum for technologists, researchers, policymakers and industry representatives to share and discuss current and emerging issues around privacy and transparency on the Internet. The objective of this workshop was to kick-start the creation of a community of research, industry, and public interest parties that will work together towards the following objectives: -The development of methodologies and user-friendly tools to promote transparency and empower users to understand online privacy issues and consequences; -The sharing of datasets and research results, and; -The support of research through grants and the provision of infrastructure to deploy tools. With the above activities, the DTL community aims to improve our understanding of technical, ethical, econom...
Effective and timely information and knowledge sharing in modern complex organizations is pivotal to their competitiveness. Challenges in such sharing often become particularly visible in the cooperation between organizations and organizational units. We outline a framework for understanding transparency drawing on 1) literature on information and knowledge sharing in operations management and knowledge management, and 2) a case from a highly complex environment -health care -and one from a highly competitive environment -the leisure boat industry. Both organizations are characterized by craft work. We further discuss how coordination could be better supported by schedules, routines, roles, and sharing of knowledge and information. Particularly, we focus on how well suited such tools, methods, and mechanisms are for increasing transparency. Finally we suggest how transparency may be enhanced by novel use of information and communication technology.
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