New Toolkit Offers Companies Guidelines, Templates for Better Transparency Reports
While companies such as Microsoft, Twitter and Verizon release transparency reports that provide information to the public about how they handle government requests for data, each company takes a different approach, which makes it difficult to compare the information presented.…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
After two years of work, New America's Open Technology Institute and Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society released the first of three components of a toolkit Thursday that identifies best practices, provides transparency report templates and establishes reporting guidelines. "Transparency reporting is vital to understanding how companies respond to government requests for our online data, and how often governments are making those requests," OTI Policy Analyst Liz Woolery said in a news release. "The Transparency Toolkit Survey & Best Practice Memos is the first comprehensive study of the state of transparency reporting in the United States." Berkman Senior Researcher Ryan Budish said in the release that the toolkit would help other companies that are thinking of creating transparency reports and offer companies that already provide such reports "an opportunity to compare, improve and innovate."