Transparency and accountability in digital public services: Learning from the Brazilian cases

Abstract

The transparency and accountability of systems and algorithms aims to protect the user against undesirable or harmful results and to ensure the application of laws appropriate to digital environments. Thus, the objective of this study is to evaluate the transparency and accountability provided to citizens in three of the main digital public services (e-services) offered by the federal administration of Brazil (ComprasNet, Sisu and Naturalizar-se) locally recognized for their significant relevance and stage of development and use. Services were evaluated from eight perspectives: accessibility; awareness; access and repair; accountability; explanation; origin of data, privacy and fairness; auditing; validation, accuracy and testing. Adopting a qualitative approach through comparative case studies, this research contributes to information practices theory (construction of a model for assessing transparency and accountability in digital public services). The results obtained show the need to inform the user of possible bias and damage arising from these systems, which are not readily perceived; just as the need to clarify the benefits that arise from the collection of private data are not. This shows that computational models can be distorted as a result of biases contained in their input data, or algorithms. This paper contributes through an innovative combination of dimensions, as a tool to evaluate transparency and accountability of government services.