IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Summer 2014 - 54

necdotally, most people
know that the video technology they use in everyday life is changing
at an alarmingly
fast pace. Individuals recognize
that the televisions they watch and
the cameras they purchase are of
increasingly higher quality, versatility, and integrated with computing technologies. However, the
same individuals who purchase and
use these technologies do not often
think about what this means in connection with the technologies used
to watch and record them. Most are
similarly unaware of the networked
infrastructures that may connect
and add new functionality to the
video surveillance systems that are
collecting and using their personal
information on a daily basis.
There is relatively little academic
research that assesses the current
level of public knowledge about
video surveillance technologies and
practices in North America. Furthermore, previous work conducted
by members of our research group
determined that private-sector compliance with video surveillance
privacy regulation is poor [2]. We
believe this makes it particularly
important to explore what citizens
know and what they need to know
about video surveillance technologies, in order to provide them with
the information and tools they need
to engage with the organizations
that collect and use their personal
information via surveillance. Our
ultimate research goal is to provide information and tools to help
members of the public understand
video surveillance technologies and
the ways they are changing. We
also strive to help citizens engage
thoughtfully with organizations
engaged in surveillance, and with
government policy makers and
the policies that regulate this surveillance. We seek to find ways to
make surveillance infrastructure
issues vivid and concrete, to make
tangible artifacts that people can
use to open up the technologies,
54

organizational practices, and builtin assumptions that are most often
hidden from public view. The issues
highlighted in our work include privacy, individual control over personal information, and the potential
for citizens to hold organizations to
account for protecting both of these
important values.
Our research addresses these
goals using two distinct but related
approaches: qualitative research to
examine the current state of awareness that Canadians have about
video surveillance, and participatory design-inspired prototyping
work to develop effective tools to
help citizens document surveillance
installations in their local environment. This article reports on the
results of both of these approaches.
We begin by discussing findings from our qualitative study of
Canadian's attitudes towards, and

What Do Canadians
Know or Want to Know
about Video Surveillance?
Video surveillance is becoming
ubiquitous in both private and public
spaces in our increasingly (in)security-conscious society. Although we
recognize the familiar look of camera housings on walls or ceilings,
the capabilities of video surveillance technologies have grown and
evolved over the past decade. As we
move from analog to digital video
on networked systems, we see the
potential for an intensive gaze on
citizens in the name of security.
The move to digital processing also
raises the possibility that the visual
image data collected might soon be
turned into actionable information.
This would occur either in real time
or retrospectively through analysis
of recorded aggregate data. Armed
with object recognition, face track-

How can we promote awareness,
consent, compliance, and
accountability in video surveillance?
awareness of, video surveillance.
We conducted on-the-street interviews with Canadians in an attempt
to understand what people living in
a Canadian urban center understand
about video surveillance systems
and privacy regulation. We then
turned to our second, participatory
design-oriented approach, which
attempts to respond to people's concerns and information needs regarding video surveillance by developing
a tool for individuals called the SurveillanceWatch app. This app uses
a crowdsourcing approach to allow
people to map sites of surveillance
and record their compliance with
privacy regulations. The design and
nature of this app is discussed in the
second section of this paper. We will
conclude by integrating discussions
of these two research approaches
and highlighting the key contributions of this work.

ing, and face recognition, visual
surveillance will soon have the
potential to become a portal into
our lives in both physical and digital spaces, tying our online "faces"
to our physical ones. Significantly,
"this conversion from image data
to information continues silently
behind the lenses of surveillance
equipment generally unseen by the
surveillance subject" [9].
research conducted primarily in the u.K., but also in Australia and Canada, tells us that people
generally have a high degree of
acceptance for video surveillance.
For example, public opinion surveys by media outlets consistently
find high levels of citizen support
for camera surveillance [5]. However, these surveys are generally
conducted after some significant
security-related event where cameras have either played a role, or it

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