The politics of tech transparency: industry reports offer openness -- and confusion

The tech industry, facing a backlash over an ongoing surveillance scandal, is making up for lost time.

Recently, companies like Facebook have clamored into court waving civil liberties banners in the hopes of persuading the media -- and their users -- that they’re serious about transparency and standing up to surveillance. While this is good news for privacy advocates, the companies’ push to include more data in so-called “transparency reports” has also become a public relations exercise, and led more companies to put out a mish-mash of data that makes it harder to tell signal from noise. Sources at several tech firms, meanwhile, have acknowledged that the transparency push has become politicized.

The revelations about PRISM triggered a global debate about privacy, but also put the tech firms in the crosshairs of critics who claimed they had sold out their users to the US government. In response, some firms that had once shunned discussions of surveillance began to come out with request data of their own; in September 2013, Facebook and Yahoo published Transparency Reports for the first time.