Google (or Uncle Google) is a wonderful tool. But as with all technology, Google can be used maliciously. Do you have a webcam in your house so you can keep an eye on your cats over the www? Well. For your sake I hope that camera is password protected.

Software that allows you to view your webcam over the web works just like a webpage — it stores documents on your computer (or some other computer, if that's the case) and when you enter the URL to view the webcam you're requesting a certain HTML document that incorporates the link to the webcam feed. So, when we know the folder hierarchy of standard webcam software — we can use our dear uncle Google to search for that particular string. If preventive measures haven't been taken, the Googlecrawlers have probably found those documents.

Here's a very nice view of a countrytown in Switzerland:

Click the image to view the feed.


Of course, that Swiss cam is probably a public feed — but what about something more private? Here's someone's bedroom:


I'm not going to link to this webcam, you can find it yourself. And yes, those controls work. I could pan and tilt the camera. Imagine being on your way to bed and suddenly the camera starts following your moves? A positively unpleasant experience.

So, there are probably a bunch of different search strings you can feed to uncle Google, but here are the two I used:

inurl:/view/index.shtml

inurl:"ViewerFrame?Mode="

All you have to do is search for those strings with Google to get tens of thousands of different feeds. Scary, eh?