EXPLORING MULTISTAKEHOLDERISM THROUGH THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION INTERMEDIARIES’ PRIVACY POLICIES
Creators: name: Sargsyan, Tatevik
Publisher: name: American University
Year: 2023

description: Privacy is one of the most contested public issues in Internet governance, and information intermediaries such as Google and Microsoft are at the forefront of defining privacy conditions of users with their privacy policies and tools that enable data collection, processing and dissemination. Invariably, information intermediaries are gaining greater surveillance capacity and reinforcing government surveillance along with technological developments, growing usage of mobile devices, and transition of online services into more personalized and integrated realm. As intermediaries access and process more data to infer valuable insights for advertising, operations, law enforcement and national security matters, user privacy becomes vulnerable to potential harms including oppression, self-censorship, discrimination, power imbalance, and others. Public interest implications of intermediaries’ policies and tools and lack of top-down regulation of their data practices have encouraged authorities and NGOs to embrace alternative forms of governance such as self-regulation and multiskateholderism to urge intermediaries’ to safeguard user privacy. These stakeholders try to influence corporate privacy policies and tools by putting pressure on information intermediaries and collaborating with them via multi-stakeholder engagements. However, despite privacy goals being actively pursued by data protection agencies and NGOs through confrontation and collaboration with information intermediaries, there is a gap in academic literature regarding the authority of these stakeholders over privacy governance—the setting and enacting of privacy policies and tools. In this light, this dissertation examines how information intermediaries’ privacy policies and tools have evolved to safeguard user privacy, and to what extent—if at all—the policy changes have occurred through a multi-stakeholder process involving intermediaries’ key stakeholders, and/or in response to their pressure. Further, this dissertation examines the benefits and limitations of dialogue as a defining characteristic of multi-stakeholder engagement between information intermediaries and NGOs and its potential for collective decision-making. This dissertation employs a mixed-method approach and combines textual analysis, process-tracing and multiple case studies, and semi-structured interviews to answer the proposed research questions while focusing on two major global information intermediaries—Google and Microsoft. The results of this dissertation demonstrate the limited authority of intermediaries’ stakeholders to influence corporate policies and refute that privacy governance happens via a multi-stakeholder process with the input and regard for non-market stakeholders’ concerns and demands. These results are further compounded by findings that dialogue and engagement between intermediaries and NGOs do not necessarily create opportunities for collective decision-making despite the tendency among scholars to think of Internet governance as an inherently multi-stakeholder process and of collaborative initiatives—as inherently more democratic and inclusive. Further, the analyses reveal that the relations between NGOs and intermediaries are entangled in funding controversies and questions about legitimacy and authority. The overall findings of this dissertation also provide evidence about the privatization of the digital public sphere in which information intermediaries increasingly regulate privacy, freedom of expression, and reputation by their policies, tools and decisions, which are largely led by market considerations rather than public interest.