Interrogating the T in FAccT

Abstract

Fairness, accountability, and transparency are the three conceptual foundations of the FAccT conference. Transparency, however, has yet to be scrutinized to the same degree as accountability and fairness. As a result, we don't know: What does this community mean when it talks about transparency? How are we doing transparency? And to what ends? What commitments does (or should) the T in FAccT signify? This paper interrogates the T in FAccT using perspectives from critical transparency literature. Subsequently, we argue that FAccT might be better off dropping the T from its title for two reasons: (1) transparency can often be counterproductive to FAccT's primary objectives and (2) it is misleading as FAccT is mainly preoccupied with explainability rather than actual transparency. If we want to keep the T, we need to reframe how we think about and do transparency by making transparency contingent, reclaiming it from explainability, and bringing people into transparency processes.