Insecam is the worlds biggest directory of online surveillance security cameras. This website groups unsecured CCTV cameras so they can be accessed easily by anyone curious. This is where I have carefully selected certain URLs that I would use in my interface. I started gathering IP addresses for four categories, house cameras, office cameras, roundabout cameras and public space cameras.
Even though the interface aims to expose unsecured personal CCTV cameras, I still included public ones. I did this because I wanted a variety of categories that could be explored by the user and it was difficult to create these based on personal cameras you find in homes. Furthermore, some of the cameras are actually public deliberately. For example, the Everyman Barbershop chain includes CCTV cameras at every chain allowing their customers to check if that branch is busy and decided whether they go and wait in the shop. I think this is a really interesting approach but it does raise questions. Do customers know that their hair cut is being broadcasted over the internet? Does Everyman provide some sort of disclaimer before they enter the shop? Moreover, public cameras are usually located in locations such as city squares and overlooking streets. I'm not sure if these are public since they were in different countries, however, thinking of street cameras in London, they are usually public and accessible by TFL.
I had some issues when picking out which brand of camera I was going to use in my interface. First, I decided to go with Defeway cameras as this particular brand seemed like it was used widely in the United Kingdom, and provided a lot of unsecured CCTV access of homes, gardens, driveways and even in some cases - inside houses. I thought this would be so creepy that it was essential that I included these particular cameras I found to my interface. I later realised that this was going to be an issue because the viewer for this brand used flash in the browser. This meant that I would possibly be adding an extra step to the user experience when someone opens my site on their device as they would need to download/enable flash first. I did test this and included an iframe to the camera on my interface, but I couldn't edit the styling of the iframe. Oliver informed me that this would be the case because essentially what I was doing was loading a website, in a website - so it wouldn't be possible. Another issue with using the Defeway cameras was that, yes they were easily accessible over the internet, they still needed the user to enter the login credentials to access the system. Conducting some research on the legality of this, many sources concluded that entering credentials, even if they are the default 'username: admin, password: *empty*, you have deliberately accused that system which you do not own. This raises a huge issue in my project. Yes, I want to be creepy and show the insides of peoples homes, but I don't want to get in trouble.
After conducting some more research and testing different brands, I found that AXIS cameras didn't require flash and the live feeds could be played in the form of mjpeg, a motion jpeg. This meant I could add the URLs to a <img> tag easily, and control the sizing which I couldn't do before. They were also readily available and did not require any credentials to be entered.
Here is an example of a public AXIS camera of a farm I found in Norway. The fun think about this camera is that it can pan, tilt and zoom. I occasionally check up on this sheep... to make sure they are still there
I began to think about the design of the interface. I wanted something which was simple and didn't represent the project in a creepy way. I did want the interface to convey feelings of survellience to the person using it. I would find some appropriate methods to convey these feelings possibly through colour or element placement. The image below shows the initial idea I had:
I started experimenting with code and designing the interface which allows the user to compare two live feeds in one go. The way it works is; when the user begins viewing, two random URLs are taken from an array, where they are all stored, and displayed inside a <img> tag. I decided to add a 'fun', hopefully not creepy way, to gamify the interface by posing the user a question such as 'Whose house is prettier?' The user would then need to vote accordingly.
The images below show the progress I have made in the interface so far.
In conclusion, I am not too happy with the interface as I do not feel like feelings of surveillance are being conveyed properly here. In retrospect, I don't believe the colours make sense it promoting these feelings in the user. Furthermore, the UX in the site doesn't make sense. I kind of coded it up for failure. It's not apparent that the user must click on the top menu 'HOMES OFFICE ROUNDABOUTS...' to alternate between CCTV cameras. There are definitely ways to combat this issue, I had just given up at this point and will be rethinking the UX and designing new UI.
Bibliography list:
Bitnik, !. (2019). !Mediengruppe Bitnik | Surveillance Chess. Available at: https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.org/s/ (Accessed: 2 October 2019)
Yourprivacy.co.uk. (2019). CCTV Cameras And Your Privacy. Available at: http://www.yourprivacy.co.uk/cctvsystems.html (Accessed: 2 October 2019)
Smith, M. (2019). Peeping into 73,000 unsecured security cameras via default passwords. Available at: https://www.csoonline.com/article/2844283/peeping-into-73-000-unsecured-security-cameras-thanks-to-default-passwords.html (Accessed: 2 October 2019)
Reference list:
Everyman Barbers. (2019). Everyman Barbers. Available at: https://www.everymanbarbers.co.uk/ Accessed: 2 October 2019)
Insecam.org. (2019). Insecam - World biggest online cameras directory. Available at: https://www.insecam.org/ (Accessed: 2 October 2019)
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