Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems

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

This book explains on a technical level how big tech companies like Google and Facebook track users on the web and sell user profiles for advertising, and it teaches computer science researchers, students, and journalists how to audit corporate surveillance systems to make them more transparent.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.