Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems
Research Methods for Greater Transparency

A technical guide to performing systematic experiments that create more transparency for corporate surveillance and its algorithms.

Isabel Wagner (Author)

9781108837668, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 31 March 2022

180 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.4 cm, 0.66 kg

'Isabel Wagner's book on Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems is a thorough and comprehensive treatise of the evolution of web tracking and how researchers have attempted to reclaim privacy for web users. It is an excellent resource for those who not only wish to get up to speed with the current state of the art, but also want to build future privacy-enhancing systems with real-world impact.' Nick Nikiforakis, Stony Brook University

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.

1. Corporate surveillance and the need for transparency
2. Technologies for corporate surveillance
3. Methods of corporate surveillance
4. Experiment design
5. Data collection
6. Data analysis
7. Transparency for corporate surveillance methods
8. Transparency for corporate services
9. Effectiveness of countermeasures
10. Making it count: towards real-world impact
11. Future directions in transparency research.

Subject Areas: Privacy & data protection [URD], Databases & the Web [UNN], Data mining [UNF], Data capture & analysis [UNC], Legal aspects of IT [UBL], Ethical & social aspects of IT [UBJ], Data protection law [LNQD], Privacy law [LNDC2], Surveillance services [KNSS1], Corporate crime [JKVK]