Never mind Allen Funt - wherever you are, don't be surprised if somewhere, somehow, some time when you least expect it, someone somehow approaches you to say, one way or the other, "Smile - you're on Candid Webcam".
With technological advances allowing tiny, affordable video cameras in the hands of people with a penchant for peeping, many of your private doings and undoings could be making you an unwitting star of the small computer screen.
And that spells potential trouble in the adult Web industry, which includes a good number of Web sites featuring images produced by the devices and often attacked for not being candid as to whether the subjects consented to taping.
The Associated Press and others report a "troubling" new voyeur's market, especially with items like smoke detectors, exit signs, cell phones, stuffed animals, just about anything able to hold a hidden camera.
And Net entrepreneurs, the AP says, sell videotapes for home viewing or charge for sneak peeks on their Web sites.
But what about stopping the practices? Well, the cameras can be and often are hard to find. Authorities are not always certain what can be done when they are found. And, for every unwitting victim who gets wise to his unwitting appearances on someone's peek-a-boo Web site, there will probably be a candid webcammer with enough smarts to think about making a First Amendment case in his own favor.
Laws also vary from state to state, and prosecutors are often wary of bringing charges in such cases without specific laws - which can be prone to Constitutional challenges - targeting surreptitious taping and Net posting.
In fact, 28 people have filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court against the makers and distributors of such videotapes that were made in the locker rooms at Northwestern University, Illinois State, Eastern Illinois University, and the University of Pennsylvania.
The tapes were exposed when someone making one hidden camera tape in a locker room was scared off, the AP says, and left a bag behind which contained his camera and tapes displaying names like "Voyeur Time" and "Straight Off The Mat".
Vortex Technology's Lauren Weinstein, who has been involved with the Internet since it first became used outside the military environment, says we now have people planting cameras everywhere they can find in theoretically public places, then using them as they please.
Weinstein also moderates an online discussion called Privacy Forum. ``That can be something as disruptive as someone who is hiding a little video camera with mirrors on their shoe and shooting pictures up skirts in the mall or people who put cameras in private places to try to get their jollies or to sell them,'' she tells the AP.
But even with legal uncertainty, the practice could turn soon enough to into potential litigation against adult Web sites and adult video makers, who are sometimes but often enough accused by critics of using surreptitiously filmed material for their visual imagery.
