TAM-VS: A technology acceptance model for video surveillance

Abstract

Video surveillance became omnipresent in our everyday live and is a lively field of research. While early research was focused on functionality, e.g., face recognition or violence detection, nowadays also privacy and transparency related work is done. While this research helps us to design systems that combine functionality and privacy, only little understanding is present how the people under video surveillance will react to the new systems. The average citizen does not understand technological details and is unable to distinguish between systems with varying privacy protection. Overall, surveillance has a bad reputation in most countries. To understand the acceptance of surveillance within a society, many questionnaires were made to ask people, if they support it in special places, e.g., airports, public transport and shopping malls, which led to many statistics about surveillance. Their outcome depends on recently happened events, e.g., a terrorists attack or a reported misuse of a video sequence. The underlying factors are not considered and no generic model for the acceptance exists. This work presents a model, based on the well known Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). It is shown, which factors lead to a personal level of acceptance. The results presented in this paper can be used to design accepted and efficient surveillance systems. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.