Articles about Transparency

Adblock Plus has been blocked from attending the IAB's (Interactive Advertising Bureau) upcoming leadership summit. The company has attended the meeting in the past, and had received an invite to this year's conference too -- but the IAB had a change of heart and retracted the invitation.

The meeting would have been an opportunity to meet with advertisers and to discuss Adblock Plus' Acceptable Ads guidelines later this week, but the IAB -- for reasons as yet undisclosed -- feels differently. In the interests of transparency (or airing dirty laundry in public, depending on your opinion), Adblock Plus has decided to go public with what's been happening.

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It's not every day that a new HTTP error code is introduced -- there are, after all, a limit to the number that could possibly be needed -- but it may not be long before you encounter a 451 error. The code has been made a new standard by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) to indicate when sites have been taken down for legal reasons.

Described as an 'HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles', it is hoped that 451 errors will introduce a new level of transparency about sites that have been killed by governments or law enforcement agencies. In some ways it is an extension of the 403 (Forbidden) error, but it provides a little more information as to why a particular site cannot be accessed.

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It has been all change at Twitter recently. After increasing the number of accounts users are able to follow, and switching the Favorite star for a Like heart, Twitter today takes the wraps off a new Public Policy and Transparency page.

This is a central hub for information about Twitter's policies relating to freedom of speech, privacy, security, and corporate responsibility, as well as being a home for transparency-related information. It's also the place to go to find out how Twitter is handling government surveillance and online legal issues.

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In the post-Snowden age, transparency reports are all the rage. After the privacy debate that followed the NSA surveillance revelations technology companies fell over themselves to publish everything they could about government data requests. Microsoft has already released transparency reports, but today unveils a new Transparency Hub.

This is designed to be a central resource through which a variety of reports can be accessed, including the Law Enforcement Requests Report and U.S. National Security Orders Report. Data for the first six months of 2015 is now available, and there is a new section dedicated to Right To Be Forgotten-style requests for data removal.

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Ad blocking has been in the news quite a lot recently, not least because of iOS 9's new support for advertising avoidance. Perhaps the most famous tool in the arena is Adblock Plus. It's something that many people have become reliant on for cleaning up their online experience but Eyeo -- the company behind AdBlock Plus -- has been keen to encourage people to permit the display of some advertising through its Acceptable Ads program.

That companies can pay to bypass Adblock Plus is nothing new, although Adblock Plus insists that most ads that are deemed 'acceptable' are added for free. Today Eyeo announces that it is going to hand over control of the Acceptable Ads program to a completely independent board.

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Like transparency reports, diversity reports have become quite the fashion at the moment. Companies such as Google, Apple, and Amazon are keen to demonstrate that they are not dominated by white, middle-class men, and that they are open to the full gamut of gender identities and sexualities. Today Facebook released its second diversity report showing that at Mark Zuckerberg's company things haven’t really improved over the last year.

More than half of the workforce (55 percent) is white, and at senior leadership level this jumps all the way up to nearly three quarters (73 percent). The percentage of black workers at the social network is incredibly low -- just 2 percent. The gender balance is largely skewed as we have come to expect. Across the company 68 percent of employees are male, although in 'non-tech' roles women make up 52 percent of the team. For those striving for equality, the numbers make for somewhat depressing reading.

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Post-Snowden there is great interest in just what involvement the government has with technology firms. There are frequent requests from government agencies for information about users and the likes of Google, Snapchat, and even the NSA itself have all released transparency reports that reveal, in broad strokes, the number of requests for data they have received.

Amazon is the latest company to release a transparency report -- although the term really should be used in the loosest possible sense. The report includes scant details about the number of subpoenas, search warrants, court orders, and national security requests received in the first five months of 2015. The report is so vague as to be virtually meaningless.

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