Best Practices for Transparency in Machine Generated Personalization

Machine generated personalization is increasingly used in online systems. Personalization is intended to provide users with relevant content, products, and solutions that address their respective needs and preferences. However,  users are becoming  increasingly vulnerable to online manipulation due to algorithmic advancements and lack of transparency. Such manipulation decreases users’ levels of trust, autonomy, and satisfaction concerning the systems with which they interact. Increasing transparency is an important goal for personalization based systems and system designers benefit from guidance in implementing transparency in their systems. In this work we combine insights from technology ethics and computer science to generate a list of transparency best practices for machine generated personalization. We further develop a checklist to be used by designers to evaluate and increase the transparency of their algorithmic systems. Adopting a designer perspective, we apply the checklist to prominent online services and discuss its advantages and shortcomings. We encourage researchers to  adopt  the checklist and work towards a consensus-based tool for measuring transparency in the personalization community.

This is a draft of the paper "Best Practices for Transparency in Machine Generated Personalization" presented at UMAP '20 Adjunct: Adjunct Publication of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, July 2020, Pages 23–28, https://doi.org/10.1145/3386392.3397593