The Complex Event Processing Blog

Web Cams: The Dark Side of the Net

No doubt everyone has read the story where the Lower Merion Township School District remotely enabled webcams on laptops to, in their words, “locate missing laptops”. What on Earth were they thinking?

Imagine your daughter has her laptop set up in her room because she did her homework last night. She goes to the shower, comes out naked (or with a towel or robe), much like most of us do at times, and sits down at the computer. The Lower Merion Township School District, looking for their laptop, remotely turns on the webcam and there is this naked school girl sitting in front of the computer! What were they thinking? Were they thinking at all?!

What kind of strange world are we living in where a school district can even think of something so stupid?! Remotely enabled webcams by your school — who would have ever dreamed of something so wrong? It sounds more like a second rate horror movie plot than something we would actually read in the news.

Oddly enough, I was flipping through the channels the other day and there was this movie on TV about cybercops in a race-against-time battle with a killer who posts his horrible torture crimes on the web and increases the speed of the death of the victim based on how many viewer are watching. Sick! The movie was called Untraceable (2008) and the website theme was “Killwithme?” The future of the web?

Then, there is the current news story of a fast growing web site where folks are playing chatroulette.com. We read where people are spending hours and hours on the net playing a game of chance where they are cast into other’s videocams. Sometimes the video roulette wheel lands in a room with a naked person, sometimes it lands in a room with someone dressed up as a killer. One site reports a video where a body appears to be hanging dead in the room!

This is not fiction, this is the world we live in. The net seems to take on a darker side day by day. Not much different than TV, nothing shocks us anymore. Dissolve live people in acid. Cook them underneath spot lights while embedded in concrete. The web has taken on a far more dangerous and darker side than we could have imagined a few years ago.

Last year I was drinking a beer in a bar and a young woman sat down beside me. She looked totally exhausted. I asked her was she OK and she proudly said “Yes, I have been on CamFrog for the past week, nearly 24 hours a day….” She told me she was addicted to watching strange videos (ones I will not describe here), and reciprocating on her web cam.

Has the web has taken a darken turn, one that many people are not aware of? There is a darker side of the web that seems to grow stranger every day. Please be careful and discuss this with your children as a part of parenting.