Webcams See All (Tortoise, Watch Your Back)

Joshua Lott for The New York Times

Every move by Franky, a 17-year-old tortoise, can be seen from the camera on his shell.

By QUENTIN HARDY

In the Sahara, the African spurred tortoise lives for about a century. Thanks to modern technology, one named Franky has a shot at immortality.

photo by Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Greg Duffy, Dropcam’s co-founder and chief executive.

“He gets about 10,000 viewers a month,” said Donnie Cook, the owner of Lou’s Pet Shop in Grosse Pointe Woods, Mich., where Franky, an easygoing 17-year-old, spends his days transmitting over the Internet a nonstop tortoise-eye view of the world. “We get people from at least 30 states, plus Italy, France.” A family in California has even sent the store $50 to keep Franky in lettuce.

Why should the National Security Agency have all the fun?

Franky’s fame illustrates the increasing surveillance of nearly everything by private citizens. Thanks to advances in miniaturization and cheap digital storage, tiny cameras are moving onto houses, people and nature. Everything is being filmed — from nannies and sleeping babies to vandalism-plagued parking lots to fireplaces awaiting Santa Claus.

YouTube gets notice for loading about 100 hours of video a minute. Dropcam, the maker of the camera atop Franky’s shell, uploads more than 1,000 hours of video a minute. That’s up about 500 percent over last year. Another 1,500 hours or more every minute is not recorded, but is presumably being watched live, according to Dropcam.

By Lou's Pet Shop

Franky, an easygoing 17-year-old tortoise, sauntered down an aisle of Lou's Pet Shop in Grosse Pointe, Mich., while broadcasting his movements online via Dropcam.

While the public is increasingly uncomfortable with the idea of government cameras and Internet snoops recording their daily behavior, there does not appear to be much introspection about routinely monitoring people, pets or handymen.

“It’s seductive to say that larger entities will do this, so we should, too, but something happens when everyone focuses this hard on their own passions,” said Evan Selinger, an associate professor of the philosophy of technology at the Rochester Institute of Technology. “Should the contractor like being seen all the time? What happens to the family unit? Sometimes the key to overcoming resentment is being able to forget things.”

People have had cameras aimed at things like garage doors and ocean views for years. But cameras that transmit images over the Internet have become significantly smaller and cheaper in recent years and easier to set up — a natural formula for widespread consumer adoption.

The number of homes in the United States with private security cameras increased by about five million last year, to 15 million homes, according to Parks Associates, a research company. A similar increase is expected this year, said Tom Kerber, Parks’s director of research.

People have found uses for the cameras in “monitoring their pets, the nanny or their kids, so much more besides security,” he said. New features like facial recognition should increase the popularity, he said.

On Christmas Eve, Dropcam activations were three times the normal rate, presumably to record presents being opened.

Dropcam’s high-definition video cameras sell for $149 and $199, and they can be monitored on most computing devices. The company has many competitors, like Axis Communications of Sweden, Pelco in the United States and several manufacturers in China. GoPro makes a popular, small camera often worn in sports like skiing. But Dropcam, just four years old, is the largest that stores video online and, like some of its competitors, also offers video storage and editing.

Ambarella, which makes video chips for both Dropcam and GoPro, recently said it was working with Google on cameras for field workers to stream their activities back to headquarters.

“Anybody who deals with the general public will be wearing a camera,” said Chris Day, Ambarella’s vice president for marketing and business development. In the 15 months since its initial public offering, Ambarella’s stock has risen 470 percent, partly on anticipation of bigger sales.

Most of what comes from a private security camera like Dropcam are unrelenting shots of empty rooms and driveways, stuff that makes YouTube’s birthday parties, bloopers and instructional flossing videos seem irresistibly scintillating. But the sheer amount of private material means an enormous amount of meaningful behavior, from the whimsical to the criminal, is being stored as never before, and then edited and broadcast. People have recorded local vandals in action, raccoons in the garbage and in one case a dog turning on a stove and setting a house on fire.

A Dropcam camera captured what its user believed to be a robbery taking place across the street from his house, according to the company.

“We happen to be there when the crazy stuff happens,” said Greg Duffy, Dropcam’s co-founder and chief executive.

More important to him, though, he said, is what billions of hours of video means for citizen empowerment.

“There are two ways to go — the government can have cameras everywhere, or people can have cameras, and there is distributed control,” said Mr. Duffy, 27. “It’s a world where you never have to be away from the things you care about.” Dropcam’s first investor was Mitch Kapor, who also co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil liberties group.

The cameras also talk. From her smartphone, Elizabeth Hamren, Dropcam’s vice president for marketing, watched her two children playing in the living room with their nanny when she saw something she didn’t like. “Jonathan, get off the train table!” she said into her phone. As the boy dismounted, she explained that she could also hear them, but tended to keep the sound off while at work.

Police forces have for some years increased the number of cameras they wear and keep on the dashboards of patrol cars, leading to a YouTube subgenre of videos of traffic stops and shootings. Citizens have responded with videos of their own, at least since the beating of Rodney King in 1991.

A video of last year's meteor taken from a camera mounted on the dashboard of a car.

Plummeting costs and ease of use have increased the activity, however. In Russia, dashboard cameras are a common tool to record police misbehavior. Last year’s meteor explosion over Chelyabinsk was immediately uploaded and shared around the world.

But some of these cameras capture more personal moments. Seth Cummings, an entertainment marketer with a home in Lake Arrowhead, Calif., was showing his children pictures of their living room decorated for Christmas when his 5-year-old pointed out that this year they would be able to record Santa on the security video.

Mr. Cummings said Santa was caught about midnight.