It seems like almost everyone today has a web cam. People use web cams for talking to friends far away, video conferencing with co-workers, as well as other things. I work at a television news station during the day and we have a web cam over the newsroom where viewers can watch what is going on in the studio 24 hours a day. The downtown in my city is also under construction, and there are tons of different web-cams scattered about downtown where people can log in to check on the progress.
Much like the web cams in my hometown Liverpool England has a variety of different web cams scattered about the city. Liverpool, the home of the Beatles is a place that Beatles fans word wide are interested in.
One such Beatles fan was watching a live web cam of a street in Liverpool and saw a sporting goods store being broken into on Mathew Street. The man was in Dallas, but he called a tip into the Liverpool police and they were able to catch the would be robbers.
Normally I would be a little wary of “Big brother’ watching my every move, or someone in another country being able to watch what I’m doing without my knowledge. Obviously these guys who were breaking in had no idea that someone was watching them. I think this story is pretty cool however.
This web cam was obviously into set up by the police to monitor criminal activity, but I imagine that police web cams are not too far off in our future. A web cam can be monitored from virtually anywhere, so you could potentially have police officer in different cities, states, or even different countries watching a particular area at any given time.
So, are web cams over streets good technology or bad? What do you think?