The camera was installed about six years ago, he says, and it's alarming that anybody who wants to can have a peek at what his receptionist is doing. Usually you need an invitation to see this far inside someone else's lounge room. This is another picture from Sydney. Credit:Insecam In another stream from Sydney, you can peer inside a lounge room. It's clear the owners have a passion for purple, with seats, rugs and cushions all coloured in different shades. In a different living room, there's an extremely elaborate child's playpen set-up, complete with plastic slide. As I munch on a banana and switch to another stream, I watch two men as they make their selections at a sandwich store. As the page refreshes, I see them move along the line, deep in conversation.

The website Insecam claims to have collected the feeds of more than 73,000 internet protocol cameras from around the world (you can watch some sort of scale in Iraq, and in Uzbekistan there's an empty, tree-lined road for viewing), including 924 from Australia. Footage from IP cameras, like CCTV ones, are streamed online for owners to view. Insecam claims to have collected more than 900 feeds from Australian IP cameras, including this one from a Queensland business. Credit:Insecam Insecam claims that that they've been able to access the feeds because owners haven't changed their passwords from the generic ones that come with the devices – like 1234, or admin. "This site has been designed in order to show the importance of the security settings. To remove your public camera from this site and make it private, the only thing you need to do is to change your camera password," Insecam says. There were dozens of feeds of baby beds and playrooms in Sydney being streamed online. Credit:Insecam

Of course, if you want to be a peeping tom, there are other ways to access this kind of thing online. There's the shadowy search engine Shodan and Google Dorking (where you use special search syntax to find information) and other surveillance camera search software. Professor James Der Derian, the Director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney, said the feeds were an invasion of privacy, but people should learn from it. He said this particular case was unique because of its scale. A baby's play-pen inside another Sydney property. Credit:Insecam "The fact is right now we are the most transparent society that has ever existed, and people would still like to believe that they are exercising privacy with bad passwords or not having passwords at all," Professor Der Derian said. "Everybody should treat anything thats being taken – a picture, an image, a video – in the default that this is public access, not private access."