# Perception of Risks and Usefulness of Smart Video Surveillance Systems
## 4 Discussion
On the other hand, one reason why men would perceive video surveillance as more useful in busy public areas could be that group-based harassment, theft or fights are possibly considered as more likely to occur in these places. For example, in big cities on weekends, it could happen that groups of drunk people are hanging out on shopping streets or in city squares. This potential explanation would also be an interesting approach for future research. The discovery of the significant interactions opens a deeper understanding of how people perceive a smart video surveillance system in different public areas. With this understanding, the use of smart video surveillance could be adapted in a targeted manner, especially after further research of these interactions. An example for a targeted adaption of the system is to deploy the system in certain low-traffic as well as high-traffic public areas. In addition, education about its use in low-traffic public areas could be designed to be appealing to women, and in high-traffic public areas, the information could be designed to be appealing to men. As already mentioned, it was shown that the effects of public areas and gender were also significant, regarding perceived usefulness. The context dependence of the acceptance of the use of conventional video surveillance reported by [PERSON] [42] is consistent with the results of the presented study that the usefulness of the smart video surveillance is perceived differently in different public areas. This also supports the results of [PERSON] [41], which showed that the usefulness of video surveillance is reported higher in train stations and playgrounds than in parks and workplaces. The significant effect of gender in the presented study indicates that women generally perceived the usefulness to be higher than men did. This finding is also consistent with previous research in which females are more supportive of conventional video surveillance systems than males [42; 45; 46]. One possible explanation for this result could be that women also rate fear of crime in the future significantly higher than men (see Section 2.1). As mentioned above, the results of this study could be used for educational purposes. For example, certain information could be explicitly addressed to women. In the best case, this would make them feel more safe in public places. The results of the perceived privacy risk of different privacy levels showed interesting effects. The assessment of privacy risk regarding the analysis of digital skeletons did not differ significantly from the perceived risk of analyzing crime weapons. Both were classified from the participants as slightly risky. In addition, both showed significant differences in perceived privacy risk compared to the analysis of biometric features and to analysis that censored them. These results support the work of [PERSON] [6]. He argued that smart video surveillance provides a selective surveillance capability that limits privacy invasion. Within the presented study, men perceived the risk to their own privacy significantly higher than women, regardless of the privacy levels, which is consistent with previous findings [42; 45; 46]. These previous studies showed that men are generally more critical of video surveillance and more often express concerns related to their own privacy. The fact that men in this sample showed significantly lower trust in the government to avoid potential privacy risks than women could be a possible factor for this result (see Section 2.1). Interestingly, regarding the perceived privacy risk, no significant interaction gender x privacy levels can be shown. In addition, more men in the study sample paid attention to installed cameras in their environment. The fact that men were significantly more attentive to surveillance cameras could be interpreted in a way that they were more aware of them because of the higher perceived risk compared to women. Moreover, it should be noted that the variable affinity for technology is not distributed equally by gender.