2021 year in review

2021 was the first year in which we were supported with a growth direction. We are grateful for the support of the DATACTIVE team who between 2018 and 2020 allowed us to grow and be more utilised by the academy world, but the quantum leap of 2021 was a turning point in the life of the Tracking Exposed project.

The most fortunate meeting was with Marc Faddoul, a researcher and analyst who shared experiences and passion for algorithm analysis, with a great capacity for fundraising and product design that we lacked.

Thanks to this union, we won several grants which allowed to onboard several new figures, and allocate ressources to start new projects and maintain previous ones.

And so Salvatore Romano, Giulia Corona, who had been volunteering at TRex for years, were able to start a more stable job, Alessandro Polidoro joined at the beginning of the year, became a lawyer and followed a new part. Rodia, Andrea and Francois Marie, approached during the summer and now form a stable part of the staff.

Now the piggy bank is also growing, diversifying the forms of support between foundations, consultancies, and donations. Let’s assume that money is no longer the most pressing issue as it was in previous years: what will the project become?

We have been able to experiment with different directions, I will list them:

• Consulting for groups who want to hold companies accountable for their actions. In this case it means having a consulting part that supports the free software project.
• Research and development funds, i.e., foundations that sponsor NGOs for the production of public material.
• Training workshops, something we started in the academic world and which is becoming increasingly useful for people who need to understand how algorithms work. This is also a consultancy form but more oriented towards education and replicability.
• Software production that replaces centralised algorithms, which puts the power back in the hands of the invidididuals.
• Lawsuits/litigations, what was only theory is now practice: we are using the results of algorithm analysis to prove possible violations of the GDPR. other laws can also be challenged.

Each of these directions brings with it primary goals that take precedence over other goals, which become collateral. Maintaining parsers and extensions, improving the analysis pipeline, is part of the technological necessities we have, but it is clear that being focused on consulting, training, or development, are activities of a different nature that bring with them changes.

In 2021 we’ve grown to a staff of almost 10 people, we pay ourselves the same amount of money, and there’s a fair amount of autonomy in deciding what needs to be done. How this will continue will be chosen by following:

• the opportunities that appear in front of us
• listening to the working group
• the changes that are taking place in the internet.

The aims of the manifesto remain valid to this day, and the funding received confirms the potential of moving towards the fediverse and claiming ownership of the algorithms.