We are all paparazzi now

In an age of increasing corporate and government surveillance, publicly accessible webcams give us a chance to do some watching of our own.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Sept. 25, 2003 | On a weekday in September, the webcam trained on Heritage Square in Flagstaff, Ariz., typically gets 300 to 400 visitors from cities like Dallas; Phoenix; Burbank, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Sacramento, Calif.; Provo, Utah; as well as from countries like Sweden, Great Britain and Germany.

Wait your turn at the site, and you can control the direction, angle and focus of the camera, temporarily taking charge of what everyone else looking at that Web page sees, too.

Zoom in on high school boys kicking a Hacky Sack around. Or, cast the remote electronic eye on a brunet woman wearing a pink shirt eating alone at an outdoor cafe. Or go cheesecake, and zero in on the back of a sweaty workman wearing only a pair of rolled-up jean shorts while standing on a ladder painting a building in the Arizona sunshine.

"The hook is people like to watch people, and they like to follow them around," says Paul Lancaster, who has had the Flagstaff webcam mounted on his business partner's Brookside Chocolate Co. store since November 2002.

With publicly accessible webcams, we can all be paparazzi now. Like what you see? Capture a snapshot of the live image with one mouse click, and e-mail it to anyone you want. In a society where all of us are constantly enduring increasing levels of surveillance -- in convenience stores, at gas stations, in front of ATMs, in parks and office buildings and street intersections -- by government and corporate interests, webcams offer a chance for us to do the watching.

Webcams, of course, are nothing new. But unlike the Jennicams of Web yore, cameras like the one in Flagstaff don't star wannabe Web celebs in their own narcissistic minidramas. They feature a cast of strangers engaging in pedestrian daily happenings in public spaces. And the numbers of such cameras in place are staggering.

Earlier in September, Carnegie Mellon University's Data Privacy Lab launched a study of publicly accessible webcams, as part of a Surveillance of Surveillances project called Camera Watch. At the beginning of the project, the researchers predicted they'd find 6,000 such cameras. But in its first few weeks, their search turned up almost 10,000, and they're still uncovering hundreds of new ones, according to Latanya Sweeney, the project's principal investigator.

Ten thousand webcams is just a drop in the bucket compared to the more than 3 million surveillance cameras deployed around the country in the name of security by businesses, local communities and even some homeowners, according to the Security Industry Association, a trade group. Life in the 21st century, increasingly, means that you are being watched. And while there have been some setbacks for the surveillance society over the last year -- jailcams have faced legal challenges, and a couple of highly publicized experiments in using computerized face-recognition systems in conjunction with video surveillance have either been abandoned or deemed failures -- there's still no question that the Panopticon tide is continuing to rise, aided by relentless technological advances.

And while wiretapping laws protect conversations in public from being recorded, your own image in public can be freely snapped, recorded and streamed and there's nothing you can do about it. So, ironically, while you can no longer be filmed and have your image streamed onto the Web if you're a female inmate in a Phoenix jail sleeping in your cell, or using the toilet, you can be recorded going about your daily business as a free citizen in the public square in Flagstaff or any other street in America.

The rising tide of surveillance, both public and private, raises some intriguing questions. Does the fact that we can increasingly do the watching ourselves, from the comfort of our computer terminals, offer an antidote to the unpleasant reality that security guards, intelligence agencies and employers are constantly watching us? Could the spread of publicly accessible webcams be a good thing, allowing society as a whole to watch the watchers, and everyone else?

Next page: Can public webcams put the reins on an Orwellian Panopticon?