Digital technologies such as big data analytics (BDA) are being increasingly used by businesses to create economic and societal value (Ferraris et al., 2019; Constantiou and Kallinikos, 2015; Günther et al., 2017; Rana et al., 2023). As a consequence, academic literature has emphasised their "disruptive potential" for enhancing corporate sustainability performance (Etzion and Aragon-Correa, 2015), creating more equal and inclusive society (Secundo et al., 2017), fostering optimal reallocation of underutilized resources (Etter et al., 2019) and enabling more participatory and democratic forms of governance (Neu et al., 2019; Ojala et al., 2019; Uldam, 2018). Conversely, the advocates of the critical approach have raised concerns about digital technologies related to privacy and security threats (La Torre et al., 2018), limitations of autonomy and freedom (Andrew and Baker, 2019), labour exploitation (Fuchs, 2010), lack of algorithmic accountability (Martin, 2019), pervasive worker control (Chai and Scully, 2019), and ecological footprint (Corbett, 2018; Lucivero, 2020). Hence, the magnitude and pervasiveness of ethical, social and environmental risks that emerge as a consequence of user data collection, storage and algorithmic processing are imposing additional responsibility upon data processing companies. To this end, the extant literature offers three main reasons for why large technology companies still lack accountability for these consequences...