I was reading the latest Yahoo transparency report and the corresponding Tumblr. When a company releases their latest version of this data, it tends to prompt me to take a look at some of the other providers who have them, like Google and Twitter. I am interested in what I can learn from these reports as far as what the government is up to, as well as the incentives behind each platform publishing their reports. I fascinated by studying the process and approach of each company, and have been tracking on what some of the common building blocks are so that I can include in my API transparency research.

The addition of CSV downloads of information requests by Twitter is worth noting and adding to my list of building blocks. Platform providers are going to have to consider adding machine-readable versions of their transparency reports to help address the growing number of requests they will bet getting in this area. Providing CSV, JSON, or even YAML access to transparency report information is going to become important for us to understand how this legal and very political layer of our worlds is evolving.

The number of government and court requests for information are up. The number of companies publishing transparency reports in response to public demand for transparency is increasing. Providing machine-readable representations of this data, as well as evolving a common API and data schema definition, is the only way we are going to be able to manage this growth and make sense of the data across platform providers. I will keep adding company transparency reports to my research and taking the time to aggregate the common elements in play across them to see if I can't contribute to this common API and schema definition for use by providers.

The original article can be found here.