Auditing corporate surveillance systems : research methods for greater transparency / Isabel Wagner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Wagner, Isabel, (Computer Scientist), author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Data protection.

Privacy, Right of.

Electronic surveillance.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xvii, 330 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2022.

Summary:

News headlines about privacy invasions, discrimination, and biases discovered in the platforms of big technology companies are commonplace today, and big tech's reluctance to disclose how they operate counteracts ideals of transparency, openness, and accountability. This book is for computer science students and researchers who want to study big tech's corporate surveillance from an experimental, empirical, or quantitative point of view and thereby contribute to holding big tech accountable. As a comprehensive technical resource, it guides readers through the corporate surveillance landscape and describes in detail how corporate surveillance works, how it can be studied experimentally, and what existing studies have found. It provides a thorough foundation in the necessary research methods and tools, and introduces the current research landscape along with a wide range of open issues and challenges. The book also explains how to consider ethical issues and how to turn research results into real-world change.

Contents:

Cover

Half-title

Title page

Copyright information

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

List of Listings

Preface

Part I Corporate Surveillance Landscape

1 Corporate Surveillance and the Need for Transparency

1.1 Evolution of Online Corporate Surveillance

1.2 Ecosystem of Corporate Surveillance

1.3 Motives for Corporate Surveillance

1.4 Undesirable Effects of Corporate Surveillance

1.5 Need for Transparency

2 Technologies for Corporate Surveillance

2.1 Networking Services

2.2 Web-Based Services

2.3 Mobile Services

3 Methods of Corporate Surveillance

3.1 Tracking

3.2 Profiling

3.3 Analytics

3.4 Advertising

Part II Methods

4 Experiment Design

4.1 Research Questions

4.2 Study Designs

4.3 Longitudinal Studies

4.4 Challenges of Studying Black-Box Systems

4.5 Input Variables

4.6 Response Variables

5 Data Collection

5.1 Ethical Considerations

5.2 Archival Data Sources

5.3 Passive Data Collection

5.4 Active Data Collection

5.5 Data Collection from Mobile Apps

5.6 Crowdsourcing

5.7 Data Storage

6 Data Analysis

6.1 Quantitative Measures for Transparency Research

6.2 Heuristics for Extracting Response Variables

6.3 Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing

6.4 Analysis of Mobile Apps

6.5 Statistics

Part III Results

7 Transparency for Corporate Surveillance Methods

7.1 Tracking

7.2 Profiling

7.3 Analytics

7.4 Advertising

8 Transparency for Corporate Services

8.1 Networking Services

8.2 Web-Based Services

8.3 Mobile Services

9 Effectiveness of Countermeasures

9.1 Ad Blockers

9.2 Tracker Blockers

9.3 Fingerprinting Blockers

9.4 Obfuscation

9.5 Tools to Raise User Awareness

9.6 Tools for Mobile Applications

Part IV Gaps and Challenges.

10 Making It Count: Towards Real-World Impact

10.1 Planning for Real-World Impact

10.2 Engaging Stakeholders and Communicating Results

11 Future Directions in Transparency Research

11.1 Methodological Challenges

11.2 Open Research Questions

11.3 Internet of Things

11.4 Smart Cities

References

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 30 Mar 2022).

ISBN:

1-108-95006-X

1-108-94694-1

OCLC:

1315646251