Read: What transparency reports don’t tell us
Digital-rights advocates routinely point to transparency reports as an essential tool to hold companies accountable for defending their customers when governments ask for their information or the disappearance of their speech.
“That’s the only way we can start to shed light on what’s happening,” Gennie Gebhart, associate director of research at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me. The San Francisco digital-rights organization has been rating corporate transparency since 2013 in its annual “Who Has Your Back?” reports.
But these days, companies are turning away from transparency reports. Corporate transactions have shuffled tens of millions of customers to service providers who don’t practice transparency reporting, while other tech firms have quietly dropped the practice or weakened their support for it. And not a single household-name tech firm seems to have adopted this habit since early 2016.
“The momentum has faded,” says Peter Micek, general counsel with Access Now. The digital-rights advocacy group is updating its index of transparency reports, which it last posted in 2016, and this pending revision will document serious stagnation in these disclosures.
The worst rollbacks have happened when companies have merged or sold off large parts of their customer base, leaving the people involved doing business with new management that lacks the old management’s commitment to transparency.
For example, Charter Communications’ 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable ended a roughly two-year spell of transparency for some 15 million TWC customers. Charter also erased past TWC transparency reports from its website, leaving just a reference to their existence on a TWC customer-help page. (The reports do remain readable on the Internet Archive’s copy of that page.) Charter, now doing business as Spectrum, said in a statement that it follows the law and that customers can consult its privacy policy.
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Frontier Communications’ 2016 acquisition of some 2.2 million broadband accounts from Verizon had a similar effect, moving those customers from a provider that started issuing transparency reports in 2014 to one that has yet to post any. Frontier did not answer multiple emails requesting comment. (I also write for Yahoo Finance, a Verizon media property.)
Other firms needed no outside encouragement to drop transparency. Ebay, for instance, appears to have posted its last report in 2013—and like TWC’s farewell filing, this one now only exists on the Internet Archive. The company did not answer email queries.
The Internet Archive’s own last transparency report? The year 2015.
“We have not compiled the stats,” the Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle said in an email. “Not for lack of desire, just lack of time. We hope to get back on it soon.”