The Inverse Transparency Toolchain: A Fully Integrated and Quickly Deployable Data Usage Logging Infrastructure

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Inverse Transparency Toolchain, a flexible, easy-to-deploy infrastructure that logs and visualizes data usage to enhance transparency for employees, applicable in research, education, and industry contexts.

Contribution

It presents a fully integrated, quickly deployable toolchain for data usage logging and transparency, addressing challenges in research and teaching environments.

Findings

Successfully handled empirical user studies

Enabled prototyping in university courses

Supported experimentation with industry partner

Abstract

Inverse transparency is created by making all usages of employee data visible to them. This requires tools that handle the logging and storage of usage information, and making logged data visible to data owners. For research and teaching contexts that integrate inverse transparency, creating this required infrastructure can be challenging. The Inverse Transparency Toolchain presents a flexible solution for such scenarios. It can be easily deployed and is tightly integrated. With it, we successfully handled use cases covering empirical studies with users, prototyping in university courses, and experimentation with our industry partner.