Insecam: Directory of Unsecured Surveillance Cameras (opens in new tab)

Some time ago I went through the list of my country (France), and some were definitively not supposed to be here.

One was in a retail shop like 100m from our office, one of my colleagues actually went there to warn the personel, and it was taken down in the next minutes (I think they cut off the power of the cameras until necessary action was taken).

An other one was in a restaurant, right above the cashier and (most importantly) the credit card terminal. The name of the restaurant was visible on a floor mat, so I could find very easily the website and the e-mail address to send an e-mail to. But then I struggled when writing the e-mail. I didn't want to sound like a hacker (and was afraid to be prosecuted), but also I really wanted them to take it down, by citing some laws here in France that is very strict about video surveillance on the workplace.

In the end I didn't send any email. I'm not a lawyer, and there was too much risk IMO. Maybe I'll try going through the ISP next time I browse the cameras.

Good work.

It's to be also noted that you live in a country, where ISPs understood what you were telling, understood its urgency, communicated properly with the affected party and remedied it within hours.

There are countries where, in order to talk to a person who understands there is a public facing IP camera it will take extraordinary effort at best and at worst you will be termed 'hacker' for visiting the 'Insecam' website and police will knock on your door within next couple of months to a year; Now good luck finding someone in the police who will listen to you and actually understands it.

It’s great that you went through the trouble to alert them.

It would be nice to automate this flow as much as possible to reduce the friction for concerned people.

Looks like a great place though I'd pick a hotel with better IT security :P Edit: Actually as it's only an advertising cam for their website they have a valid reason not to secure it :)

PS: Living in Spain so I don't have much to complain about.

A camera like this makes me question something - why was it installed in the first place? You can't distinguish things like license plates on cars or faces (I doubt ML helps here either). So what is this for? The view is beautiful, but I fail to see the purpose of it.

I'd love to visit your cold office, because here it's 37° C, very humid, and it's still a week away from the dog days of summer. Air conditioning can only do so much in this humidity.

> NOTE: The coordinates are very approximative and have accuracy in hundreds of miles

Indeed, Torino is not exactly on the sea. How are this location obtained, geoip?

I don't think these are official public webcams. At least, that's how I interpret their FAQ:

https://www.insecam.org/en/faq/

No, you can conclude that Axis cameras are by far the market leader in the IP CCTV space.

You might be thinking of the Surveillance Saver.

I have a buddy who did a revival a few years back, don't know how bit rotted it is but here's a link:

https://www.awgh.org/archives/295

Oh man, using that at work could backfire soooo badly :)

Imagine someone forgetting to protect the security cams of their meth lab or brothel.

I was going thru the UK ones and only seen one so far, but oh, so many cars in the driveway. Still looking for local ones, closest was 4 miles away. Part of me wants to find something local, drop a note thru their door.

Looks like the traffic here has alerted them ;) It's gone now.

Shodan isn't a directory of webcams the same way Google isn't a directory of webcams. Shodan indexes metadata about all devices connected to the Internet, some of them are webcams. Compared to the rest of the index though they make up a tiny fraction of the data. Shodan also indexes light bulbs, refrigerators, power plants, Minecraft servers, Kubernetes clusters and anything else that runs on a port.