Last summer I happened attend a coding meetup, there I actually met Leon Eckert who turns out to also be an ITP student (2nd year)! One of the presenters during the meetup was showing a project he did with insecure cameras pulled from insecam.org. At this point I became really intrigued by the concept and once in NYC, I started looking for cameras in the city.
Most of the cameras happen to be inside buildings. Aside of being a little creepy they are not very interesting to me, this lead me to focus in just a couple of cameras which pointed to the outdoors.
After going through the 100 or so cameras in nyc, I came across two that looked promising, the problem then was that not a lot of information is given about the location of the cameras, except for... well, the camera feed itself.
Tracking the locations
The first camera I found was actually the one with the cobblestone ground, this actually narrowed down the search significantly since only a couple of streets in ny have this type of pavement.
Looking through the internet, I came across this NYC Bike Maps website that lists all the streets in the city with cobblestone pavements.
http://www.nycbikemaps.com/maps/cobblestones/
After a long virtual walk I finally found that distinctive red building!
Time to go pay a personal visit!
Thinking forward, I am not exactly sure what do I want to do with this knowledge, the first thing that comes to mind is a video but there could be other things to explore. Perhaps distance the project from questions of privacy and surveillance and use the cameras a medium to explore something completely different.
In the mean time, here a quick video a couple of friends and I did: