About every six months, Twitter releases a transparency report detailing things like how many state-backed accounts it has suspended and the number of government requests for information on account holders. Today, Twitter is unveiling a centralized hub for those reports and the data they contain. The new Twitter Transparency Center is now live.

The Transparency Center includes past reports and summaries, transparency-related blog posts, data visualizations and a country comparison tool. In addition to English, reports will soon be available in Arabic, Turkish, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Portuguese — Twitter recently began testing automatic translations in the app in Brazil.

Required data will include things like your IP address and the type and version of your device — data Microsoft needs to maintain and improve its products and services. Optional data will scrape less-critical info, like what pictures people are inserting into Word documents to provide better image options. If you’re a commercial customer and select the optional setting, Microsoft will offer more granular Group Policy settings. Those will allow you to configure which data is collected within your organization.

For years, Microsoft has been trying to convince people that Windows 10 doesn’t violate users’ privacy, even though it collects a disconcerting amount of data. To mend its reputation, Microsoft has given Windows 10 a privacy dashboard and offered users more control over app permissions. These changes are the latest effort to improve transparency, and Microsoft says it will share more specifics when it gets closer to the retail release.

At the moment, Facebook doesn’t have a way to show when political posts come from paid campaigners, and CNBC’s source didn’t share any proposed solutions.

“We think it’s important that political campaigns have the guidance and tools to be transparent,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC. “That’s why we recommend campaign employees make the relationship clear on their accounts. We welcome clearer guidance from regulators in this area.”

According to Facebook’s Ad Library, Bloomberg has spent $48.5 million on campaign and issue ads since last May, and his latest strategy represents relatively uncharted territory.

“We are meeting voters everywhere on any platform that they consume their news. One of the most effective ways of reaching voters is by activating their friends and network to encourage them to support Mike for president,” Bloomberg campaign senior national spokesperson Sabrina Singh said in a statement provided to CNBC.

Over the past few years, Facebook has taken steps to add transparency around political ads. It began labeling paid political posts and archiving them in its Ad Library. But the company also faced criticism for allowing politicians to post untrue ads.

Last week, Facebook told Instagram influencers that they must disclose paid partnerships with political campaigns. It’s unclear if it will require similar disclosures for campaign staff, or how it would enforce such rules.

Following India, TikTok received the most user information requests from American authorities. In the US, it got 79 requests related to 255 accounts, and went on to share information in 86 percent of cases. In third was Japan, where authorities requested information 35 times.

“To foster candid dialogue essential to earning and maintaining trust, we are publishing our first transparency report this year, providing insight into how we responsibly respond to legal requests regarding user content,” TikTok said. “Through regular updates, we aim to give our community the opportunity to better understand the actions we take on their behalf and evaluate us based on up-to-date information.”

While it might be tempting to suggest ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns and operates TikTok, isn’t being fully transparent, there’s a more likely explanation for any missing Chinese stats. It’s that TikTok isn’t available in China. In its home country, ByteDance offers a separate but similar app called Douyin. According to a BuzzFeed News report published last year, all of ByteDance’s TikTok servers are located outside of China.

The report comes as ByteDance attempts to convince American lawmakers that the Chinese government isn’t using TikTok to spy on US citizens. Earlier this week, the US Army, following the Navy, banned the use of the app on government-issued phones out of cybersecurity concerns. ByteDance has reportedly considered selling its stake in TikTok as a way to address those concerns. In the meantime, TikTok says it will issue a transparency report for the second half of 2019 sometime in the next few months.

There could be good reason to disclose those data requests. Previously released documents have revealed that Equifax, Experian and TransUnion received a “large number” of 750 NSLs, and the senators note that these companies received “dozens” of letters ending gag orders on individual requests. That’s a lot of vital personal data (including purchase habits and credit ratings) shared without the need for court approval, not to mention records that could provide insight into past criminal cases.

The companies haven’t responded to requests for comment so far. The senators gave them until December 27th to address concerns, though, so they won’t have long to provide explanations. Whether or not those explanations satisfy senators or lead to successful legislation is another matter. Even if the answers are unsatisfactory, there’s no guarantee Congress could force credit agencies to show when the FBI demands financial data.

To say the Ad Library bugged out at the worst possible time would be an understatement. On Thursday, people in the UK will vote in what will likely go down as one of the most important elections in the country’s history. Who they decide to lead their parliament will have major implications on Brexit, as well as a whole host of other issues that stem from the decision to leave the European Union.

Facebook told CNN Business and several other publications, “We have fixed the bug and all of the impacted ads in the UK are now back in the Ads Library.” The company didn’t say what caused the issue in the first place, nor did it comment on exactly how many ads disappeared.

The issue was first spotted by researchers from Who Target Me?, a non-profit organization that advocates for political ad transparency. The group told Sky News, the first publication to report on the issue, “tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands” of ads went missing from Facebook’s database.

Due to the bug, the platform couldn’t provide accurate spending figures. It said, for example, that Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party spent less than £200 on advertising on Facebook since November 8, instead of the more than £100,000 previous data had shown. In effect, the Ad Library couldn’t do what it was designed to do, which is provide a clear accounting of how politicians advertise on Facebook.

For Facebook, whatever caused the bug, the company will likely come under more pressure to change its political ad policies. There are already calls for the social media giant to follow Twitter in banning political advertising from its platform, and this latest misstep doesn’t make Facebook look adept at handling sensitive issues.

Twitter is already putting the Privacy Center to use. In a post shared on the page, it explains that it is making a few privacy policy updates, effective January 1st. Those will comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CPPA), which requires large businesses to give consumers more transparency and control over their personal information, Reuters reports.

Among the changes, for users outside of the US and EU, the entity that provides Twitter is switching from Twitter International Company, based in Dublin, Ireland, to Twitter Inc., based in San Francisco. That will allow Twitter to experiment with new features and settings, some of which may have been prohibited by Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it simplified the language around its policies, but it also accidentally stored and shared some users’ location data, shared data with advertisers without users’ permission, exposed private tweets of some Android users and admitted your phone number may have been used for targeting ads.

“Twitter is not perfect at privacy and data protection,” the company admitted in a blog post. It promises its privacy and data protections are evolving. Time will tell if the Privacy Center improves privacy or just makes it easier to stay up-to-date on bugs and breaches.

It’s essentially a budgeting spreadsheet that will help creators map the cost of their projects. Like the Funding Calculator Kickstarter created in August, Project Budget will remind creators of expenses they may otherwise overlook — like taxes and fees. Once a Project Budget spreadsheet is complete, creators will have the option of sharing it in a new section of the project page.

The feature is aimed at helping projects actually deliver, and do so in a timely fashion. It could also make campaigns more transparent. The latter is in line with new rules aimed at “honest and clear presentation.” Earlier this year, the platform asked creators to stop calling everything “the world’s best” and making other dubious claims.

In a blog post, Kickstarter says it wants “creators to be able to provide their backers with more clarity and insight into how they plan to spend the funds they raise on Kickstarter. We hope that this feature will give backers a sense of where their pledges are going, and how much it actually costs to bring an idea to life.”

“The publication of this information is an important milestone in our efforts to improve transparency and help address broader uncertainty about how often governments are coming to Google to request access to enterprise customer data,” said Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian in a brief blog post.

In the same post, Google outlines five new principles that the company says will guide its government advocacy efforts moving forward. As part of the new principles, Google says governments should approach companies directly when they want access to their data. Similarly, the company says jurisdictions should promote transparency efforts, including ones taken up by cloud service providers like Google, as well as efforts from governmental agencies.

The company will also push governments to provide a clear way for companies to challenge any data requests. Additionally, Google says it will continue to support policies that promote the creation of better security technologies. Last but not least, Google notes it will support initiatives that attempt to modernize existing policies. At the moment, however, we haven’t seen Google put its new pillars in action.

Over the years, Google has tried to make its transparency reports more useful to the public. In 2017, for instance, the company redesigned the documents to make them easier to read. At the time, Google said it embarked on the redesign because it saw how they “can help inform and shape the public debate about information online.” It’s likely the same thought inspired the company’s latest efforts.

The YouTube Union was formed last year amid tensions between YouTube and the content creators who post videos to the platform, but as a community group rather than a true union it had little power to back up its position. The new joint initiative, called FairTube, aims to pressure the platform to be more transparent about its rules and decisions, especially in regard to monetization or demonetization of videos.

The YouTubers Union is headed by Jörg Sprave, a German content creator who makes videos of weird slingshots and has over 2 million subscribers. He got involved in activism after YouTube took down some of his videos as part of a crackdown on weapon-related content on the platform, even though they didn’t violate the site’s content guidelines.

Many YouTubers have had similar experiences of videos being taken down or demonetized without explanation. Some prominent creators have access to a YouTube Partner Manager who can answer queries, but smaller creators often find it impossible to contact any real human being at YouTube. With bots doing the majority of the moderation on the site, it’s easy for videos to be miscategorized and hard for creators to appeal these decisions.

With the support of IG Metall, the campaign intends to examine the legality of YouTube’s policies in the European Union. The announcement videos suggests legal strategies including questioning whether content creators should be considered employees of the site and using Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation law to force greater transparency over personal data. The campaign says it will begin this legal examination if the site does not respond to its demands by August 23rd.