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8 Critical Analysis L. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/cclaysolw8 and id is 1 raw text is: Transparency in the Digital Environment Ida Koivisto* Abstract In this Editor's Introduction to the CAL Special Issue on Transparency in the Digital Environment, I discuss some of its overarching themes and underlying concerns. I also present the eight articles that constitute this issue: What kinds of manifestations can trans- parency as an idea have in the digital environment? Transparency has proven to be a nor- matively attractive concept in ethical and legal debates of automated decision-making, data protection, platform governance, artificial intelligence, and so on. In many of them, the recurring worry is this: Who is accountable for the functioning of algorithmic systems? How can we know how these systems work? By way of an answer, transparency is often considered the solution. However, although we worry similarly about accountability in both analog and digital contexts, the latter poses technological, regulatory, and ethical challenges, which may not always find a perfect counterpart in the analog environment. I show how the articles in this special issue represent three different approaches to transparency: re- formative, performative, and conceptual. I conclude that we should continue critical dis- cussion on the big words that dominate the current debates of legitimacy in the digital environment. I. Introduction: Transparency Goes Digital Some years ago, I saw an art exhibition by Taryn Simon, an American photographer. Among other works of art, The Innocents (2003), a series of photographs, was on display. Each photograph depicted a reconstruction of a crime scene, showing the place where the crime had taken place and the person who had supposedly committed it. The photographs came with captions that explained this idea. Otherwise, the photos would have merely shown different people in different environments: a man hiding under a mattress, a man in a bar, a man and a woman against a brick wall. The catch was that the people in the pictures were convicted based on eyewitness evidence. Later, DNA testing-a technology that was not available at the time of the conviction-proved them innocent. In some cases, this happened after decades of confinement. I was perplexed, and it took me a while to understand why. I realized that the pic- tures constructed a disturbing half-truth; they showed wrongly convicted people amidst actual crime scenes after a considerable amount of time had passed. Additionally, the text made a significant difference. Without the captions, I would not have suspected that the person was in the middle of a crime scene. If I had not known that a crime had occurred, I * Associate Professor of Public Law, University of Helsinki. My warmest thanks to Markus Dubber and Simon Stern for inviting me to guest-edit this special issue and to all the contributors. I also thank Trond Ove Tollefsen and Riikka Koulu for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of the text and Linda Syd- anmaanlakka for research assistance. ISSN 2291-9732 A

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