This research draws on critical transparency studies to consider the role of transparency in financial systems, and particularly data brokerage platforms. Data brokers are economic actors who collect data as an asset and lease its use to various clients. Data brokers are often lauded as a corrective to the opacity of financial markets—an ostensibly good thing, as lots of retrospectives on the 2007-2008 financial crisis identified a lack of transparency into the complicated chains of subprime debt ownership as a key driver of the market crash.
Without disputing that this played an important role, Matthew Zook and I argue that transparency as such is also a fraught solution and should only be cautiously romanticized because it can still be leveraged in a variety of different ways to defend powerful financial interests. Analyzing data from Crunchbase about data broker platforms, and drawing on case studies of two data brokerage platforms in particular, we identify four kinds of transparency practices that data brokerage firms use to infuse data with value: building relationality, increasing granularity, managing directionality, and creating legibility.
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