Who watches the watchers? The BBC gives it a go

Written on 1st June 2009                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Martin Bryant, Co-founder, Social Media Café Manchester

The UK has the dubious honour of being one of the most watched places in the world thanks to the vast number of CCTV cameras that keep an eye on public spaces 24 hours a day. In 2002 it was estimated that there were 4.2 million of these cameras nationwide and a member of the public could expect to be recorded up to 300 times in one day.

While many of these cameras are privately owned, some offer public online feeds. Now the BBC is crowdsourcing a directory of publicly viewable CCTV.

The producers of current BBC2 series Who’s Watching You? have created a map that aims to link to every CCTV camera in the country with an online feed. The public is being encouraged to submit details of any that are currently missing.

The map is still quite sparsely populated at present, with the BBC’s own webcams making up the bulk of submissions. As an almost-live view of everyday British life there are a few gems though. One camera is trained on the famous zebra crossing on London’s Abbey Road, updating every second. It’s frequent enough to get flavour for life in an upmarket part of the capital. Mountaintop views and the Brighton seafront are also just a click away.

What’s clear from the map as it stands though is that public camera feeds are generally useless as a surveilance tool. Most of them refesh every few minutes and aren’t close enough to street level to identify individuals. It’s the ones that don’t have online feeds that the British public should be concerned about.

As Mike Rubin, Series Producer for Who’s Watching You? says “The official figures suggest that there are around 30,000 CCTV cameras operated by public authorities. Beyond that, there are hundreds of thousands – and almost certainly millions – of private CCTV cameras”.

bbc, british, camera, crowdsourcing, webcams

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Perverts dig webcam spy software: the price is prison

Written on 7th August 2008                                                                                                              2 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Ever since the webcam became a popular product, some guys have tried to get girls nude in front of the camera. Sometimes they succeeded. Almost every high school has that one girl of who everybody knows how she looks naked, since some ex boyfriend couldn’t resist to send some of the pics to his friends. Back then, you could say the girl was naive and, frankly, quite stupid. Yet recently, some techie perverts install webcam spy software on girl’s laptops. So did a student from the University of Florida. The 23-year old made more than 20.000 pics of ten girls, most of them in state of undress.

He wrote the software himself and allegedly installed it when girls asked help when they had computer problems. Some of them noticed a light blinking sometimes, but didn’t realize this was their webcam.

The secret fantasies of the American student do have a price though. Now that he got caught, he faces possible felony charges – which means he might end up in prison.

On our side of the Atlantic ocean, a similar case occurred. A 22-year old Dutchman was sentenced to thirty months of prison, of which 12 months on probation, for fornication sexually harassing nine young girls via their webcams. He hacked the cam of the under-aged girls by sending infected photographs.

privacy, spyware, webcams

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