People looking to let city police know how the force is doing learned Monday that they could do so via an online survey.
And, if they want, they can do that same survey over and over again.
The Thunder Bay Police Service’s citizen’s satisfaction survey was launched online Monday. But tbnewswatch.com recently learned that the survey has no safeguard in place to stop people from submitting multiple forms from the same computer.
After studying the survey, Dougall Media web programmer Sean Skillen said while anyone with enough skill can circumvent programming to stop users from “spamming” a survey, the police appear to have no measures in place to stop anyone from doing it.
“They could have easily put in a couple of safeguards so that the average person couldn’t get around it,” Skillen said.
“I don’t see any safeguard in place right now, so the average computer user can just continually take the survey, whereas, to put in a pretty basic safeguard wouldn’t be too much effort from a technical point of view.”
Thunder Bay Police Service spokesman Chris Adams said that’s alright though because once the data is collected, even though the survey is anonymous and confidential, multiple responses from one IP address would be a pretty easy indicator that someone is trying to skew the results.
“If a handful of them were multiples and we took those out we’d still have a fairly good statistical range to look at,” Adams said.
But one IP address doesn’t mean one person, or even one computer, Skillen said. Many office buildings use the same IP address for many computers.
“It could mean an entire building, hundreds of people, so using an IP isn’t necessarily a good safeguard,” he said.
Adams pointed out that it’s the first time the force has surveyed online, and because of that they are willing to take a look at how the process was done this year and make adjustments in the future.
And it’s a much cheaper way of gauging public perception than in years past with mail-outs, he added.
Conducting a scientific poll could cost upwards of $20,000, something the police don’t have this year for surveys.
“We’ll take everything we get with a grain of salt as far as its statistical accuracy,” he said.
Results from the survey are expected in February.
