Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems: Research Methods for Greater Transparency

Description

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.

Isabel Wagner is an Associate Professor in the Cyber Technology Institute at De Montfort University. She is a Senior Member of IEEE and ACM. Her research in privacy, computer networks, and experimental research methods is the foundation for this book on transparency and web measurement. She has given tutorials on this topic, for example at WWW 2020, and taught undergraduate and postgraduate courses on experimental methods to study corporate surveillance.

'The book is an excellent resource that reviews, categorizes, analyses and systematically compares current research publications addressing privacy vs. surveillance and the technical methods used by both sides. This book is an IEEE S&P Systematization-of-Knowledge paper (SoK) in book-length. Compiling such a complete list of research papers and systematizing them is valuable, as it has unfortunately become rare today. Every aspect of privacy research is covered in detail. For instance, Chapter 4 looks at how privacy research is designed and in one subsection focuses on how eight papers phrase their research questions that all pertain to characteristics of corporate surveillance (Table 41, page 59). I really enjoyed the book as it serves as a comprehensive collection of research and gives readers the resources to understand corporate surveillance ecosystems.' Edgar Weippl, University of Vienna '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