Thanks to the NSA leaks and resulting media interest in surveillance, the public is awakening to the threats posed by ubiquitous information dragnets. But our awareness is grossly incomplete – and that applies not just to direct surveillance by governments that do their best to keep it secret. Our knowledge and understanding of how tech and communications companies behave is also shallow, at best.

Several valuable projects already seek to measure government censorship of the internet. In particular, the OpenNet Initiative has been doing deep research into exposing state-mandated filtering and censorship around the world. (Note: OpenNet is operated primarily by university research centers, including the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with which I've been affiliated for many years.)

The corporate actors in the burgeoning surveillance states have not gone unnoticed. But we know far too little about their practices, and even worthy efforts like the Global Network Initiative – aimed at "advancing freedom of expression and privacy" in the tech sphere by creating operating principles for those companies – have proceeded at a snail's pace. That's not surprising, given the organization's varied participants and their goals.

Others have been working to help people learn to what extent they can trust at least a few of these companies to protect their data when government snoops come calling. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Who Has Your Back" project has surveyed a number of US companies in the internet ecosystem to create star ratings across six categories, including whether the company requires a warrant before giving up information to law enforcement. The least protective were Verizon, which got zero stars in this year's survey; one star each for Apple and AT&T; the best were Sonic.net, an internet service provider, and Twitter, with six stars each. (The EFF gave Yahoo a special star for its recently revealed – but ultimately unsuccessful attempt – to protect users' privacy from what it believed to be overbearing government surveillance; however, Yahoo ranks low overall in the survey.)

Meanwhile, the Measurement Lab project has created a platform for researchers to deploy tools that help them measure how the internet is working, including such things as bandwidth. The Neubot, for example, is an Italian project designed to measure ISPs' performance on "network neutrality".

Another promising new project, "Ranking Digital Rights", wants to go deeper and more broadly into measuring and publicizing corporate data and communications responsibility. Its founder, Rebecca MacKinnon (who is a friend), is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, former CNN Beijing and Tokyo bureau chief, co-founder of Global Voices Online, and author of last year's influential Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom.

Where the EFF focuses on American companies, MacKinnon is looking globally. She and her collaborators will be asking companies around the world to answer detailed questions about how they operate, with special attention to human rights issues. By publicizing the ones that have the best practices, she hopes, more will have an incentive to move in that direction.

She sees this work as "part of an emerging ecosystem of projects whose goal is to help the public to obtain measurable information what companies and governments are doing with and to the internet. The better-informed we are, the more we can do to make sure what's happening is in our interests and is accountable to us.

All of these initiatives are useful, even essential. Yet, to operate in our modern world, we make a series of "agreements" with companies selling us services: they will collect and use data about us in return for providing the services. This is true for financial institutions, internet companies, hardware vendors and all the others. The agreements are one-sided: we say yes, and send our money or use the services in return for vast privacy invasions, or else we are excluded.

But can we, using data from the EFF et al, genuinely challenge the increasingly tight controls companies and governments are exerting? How can we shame an ISP into doing the right thing when the ISP is either effectively a monopoly or part of a cozy duopoly, as is the case in much of the US? Can we depend on Google to protect our data – assuming, as the company swears, that it's doing the best it can today – when management of the company moves into new hands someday? And can we ever trust the tech industry in the context of regimes that create secret laws and regulations that make a mockery of what few privacy rights we have?

As noted previously in this space, I'm absolutely convinced that there's an opportunity for big companies and entrepreneurs alike to create products and services that are designed from the ground up with privacy and security in mind. But measurements and data of the sort these organizations are providing is going to be essential along the way. They deserve our support.