Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems

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.

Author Biography

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.