Abstract
Facing pressure from stakeholders, companies in the information and communications technology (ICT) sector have begun to release reports tabulating and detailing government requests they receive to restrict access to content and hand over user data. While these reports initially aimed to reassure customers, privacy advocates, and other observers that the companies deserve trust and defend user interests, their rapid spread and growth following revelations of mass surveillance in 2013 has led to transparency reporting becoming an expected, normal channel of communication to the public, and an indicator of ethical considerations by tech and telecom firms. This chapter charts the rise of transparency reporting, noting its foundations in financial regulation, human rights norms, and corporate social responsibility discourses. We investigate the diverse array of academic, civil society, and regulatory stakeholders promoting and analysing the reports, as well as legal and discretionary limitations to the practice. We posit transparency as an enabler for an ethical framework for online service providers (OSPs), as well as a functional way to assuage user bases regarding privacy and freedom of expression concerns. Expanded and standardized reporting on more categories of corporate activity could further illuminate the opaque decisions that OSPs make about content and user data, and lead to more ethical outcomes.
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Notes
- 1.
Deibert et al. (2008) offers an overview of filtering practices in 26 countres around the world.
- 2.
There is an ongoing case against Cisco, see (“Doe I v. Cisco,” 2016).
- 3.
A regularly updated list of companies that publish transparency reports can be found at Access Now’s Transparency Reporting Index: https://www.accessnow.org/transparency-reporting-index
- 4.
Examples include Oxfam’s Behind the Brands Campaign (for the food industry), The Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative, and the anti-sweatshop movement of the 1990s, which led to the White House Apparel Industry Partnership in 1995 (“Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative” 2003; Ratute, 2010). Non-sector-specific examples include the Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index and the FTSE4Good Index.
- 5.
See principle 21 of the UNGPs.
- 6.
See principle 23 of the UNGPs.
- 7.
See for example AT&T, http://about.att.com/content/csr/home/frequently-requested-info/governance/transparencyreport.html, MTN https://www.mtn.com/Sustainability/Documents/Digital_Human_Rights.pdf and Vodafone https://www.vodafone.com/content/sustainabilityreport/2015/index/operating-responsibly/human-rights.html, while searches of Google and Facebook corporate communications turn up no references.
- 8.
The GNI membership includes academics, investors, human rights organizations, companies and others, but not governments.
- 9.
Other examples include United Nations Global Compact, Global e-Sustainability Initiative (GeSI), Telecommunications Industry Dialogue.
- 10.
One of the authors, Peter Micek, is employed by Access Now.
- 11.
See for example indicators F7 “Data about government requests,” F8 “Data about private requests,” and P11 “Data about third-party requests for user information.”
- 12.
The project started in 2010.
- 13.
A no-longer-maintained list of warrant canaries was compiled by the Canary Watch initiative at canarywatch.org
- 14.
- 15.
Microsoft states in the U.S. National Security Orders section of its latest transparency report that it is providing “recent data using the new, [narrower] range” (“U.S. National Security Orders Report” 2016). Yahoo went a step further by publicly disclosing the three National Security Letters it received from the FBI (Masden, 2016).
- 16.
Although this seems to change, especially in the EU context as more and more OSPs become subject to government and EU-level legal scrutiny in various areas including antitrust, tax or data protection.
- 17.
Examples include UN Guiding Principles on Business & Human Rights, the UN Global Compact Ten Principles, Global Network Initiative Principles, and the efforts of various shareholder advocacy organizations as well as socially responsible investing companies (Sjöström 2010).
- 18.
An example is the onlinecensorhip.org project, which “seeks to encourage social media companies to operate with greater transparency and accountability toward their users as they make decisions that regulate speech” (“onlinecensorship.org” CitationRef CitationID="CR51">2016</CitationRef>).
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Micek, P., Aydin, D.D. (2017). Non-financial Disclosures in the Tech Sector: Furthering the Trend. In: Taddeo, M., Floridi, L. (eds) The Responsibilities of Online Service Providers. Law, Governance and Technology Series, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47852-4_13
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