Open Access

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.

To learn from the past, we analyse 1,088 "computer as a target" judgements for evidential reasoning by extracting four case elements: decision, intent, fact, and evidence. Analysing the decision element is essential for studying the scale of sentence severity for cross-jurisdictional comparisons. Examining the intent element can facilitate future risk assessment. Analysing the fact element can enhance an organization's capability of analysing criminal activities for future offender profiling. Examining the evidence used against a defendant from previous judgements can facilitate the preparation of evidence for upcoming legal disclosure. Follow the concepts of argumentation diagrams, we develop an automatic judgement summarizing system to enhance the accessibility of judgements and avoid repeating past mistakes. Inspired by the feasibility of extracting legal knowledge for argument construction and employing grounds of inadmissibility for probability assessment, we conduct evidential reasoning of kernel traces for forensic readiness. We integrate the narrative methods from attack graphs/languages for preventing confirmation bias, the argumentative methods from argumentation diagrams for constructing legal arguments, and the probabilistic methods from Bayesian networks for comparing hypotheses.

We present an approach to reduce the complexity of adjusting privacy preferences for multiple online social networks. To achieve this, we quantify the effect on privacy for choices that users make, and simplify configuration by introducing privacy configuration as a service. We present an algorithm that effectively measures privacy and adjusts privacy settings across social networks. The aim is to configure privacy with one click.

We identify 74 generic, reusable technical requirements based on the GDPR that can be applied to software products which process personal data. The requirements can be traced to corresponding articles and recitals of the GDPR and fulfill the key principles of lawfulness and transparency. Therefore, we present an approach to requirements engineering with regard to developing legally compliant software that satisfies the principles of privacy by design, privacy by default as well as security by design.