Developing Metrics for Surveillance Impact Assessment

Conducting surveillance impact assessment is the first step to solve the "Who monitors the monitor?" problem. Since the surveillance impacts on different dimensions of privacy and society are always changing, measuring compliance and impact through metrics can ensure the negative consequences are minimized to acceptable levels. To develop metrics systematically for surveillance impact assessment, we follow the top-down process of the Goal/Question/Metric paradigm: 1) establish goals through the social impact model, 2) generate questions through the dimensions of surveillance activities, and 3) develop metrics through the scales of measure. With respect to the three factors of impact magnitude: the strength of sources, the immediacy of sources, and the number of sources, we generate questions concerning surveillance activities: by whom, for whom, why, when, where, of what, and how, and develop metrics with the scales of measure: the nominal scale, the ordinal scale, the interval scale, and the ratio scale. In addition to compliance assessment and impact assessment, the developed metrics have the potential to address the power imbalance problem through sousveillance, which employs surveillance to control and redirect the impact exposures.