Assertions of Data Transparency: Organized Immaturity After GDPR

If organized immaturity presents a key problematic of private sector digitalization, transparency is in-creasingly proposed as its antidote. Transparency, it is often claimed, enables the reorganization of maturity by allowing individuals insight into and control of the ways companies collect and leverage personal data about them. However, studies of the state of "data transparency" in Europe after the en-actment of GDPR suggest that new transparency measures may be as misleading as they are informa-tive. What, then, is the relationship between transparency and organized immaturity? In this conceptual paper, I combine speech act and decoupling theory to argue that the assertiveness of decoupled trans-parency may produce both individual maturity and immaturity. Interestingly, this entails that even de-ceptive transparency might become an engine for reorganizing maturity -- although not without risk. Theorizing these relations, however, allows for outlining implications for actors engaged in data pro-tection to increase transparency's potential for reorganizing maturity.