Scary side of Webcams

A Webcam in a girls' locker room in the Nashville, Tenn., area. That's the story (and now lawsuit) with which the New York Times led. "Like each Web page, each [Net-connected Webcam] has an address, and unless the cameras have been concealed behind software firewalls, their addresses make them specifically searchable and identifiable [by any Web surfer]. A Google search one day last week indicated more than 10,000 such Web cameras," the Times reports. It looks like, as with many Net-related technologies, the law has not caught up with Webcams. Nor with the camera-security policies of sellers and buyers (such as schools) of Webcams. Then there's the difference between accidental and deliberate access to Webcam images. In the girls' locker room in Tennessee, the images of teenage girls in underwear were protected only by a default username and password that the school had never changed. "Lists of default passwords for many different types of computer systems are available on almost any 'hacking' site," and hackers probably aren't the only people interested in access to these kinds of Webcam images. Now we need to tell our young athletes to check locker rooms for cameras before they change. And we also need to find out where schools and daycare centers have security cameras installed!