Big Brother really is watching you — even in the buff.
Spooks in the UK secretly monitoring Yahoo webcam streams from around the world discovered that many people liked to share photos of their bodies, a new report says.
In fact, as many as 11 percent of the webcam streams monitored by Government Communications Headquarters – the UK’s equivalent of the NSA – contained images of nudity or people engaged in sex, The Guardian newspaper reported Thursday.
“Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person,” a GCHQ report said.
“Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.”
The document estimated that between 3 and 11 percent of the Yahoo webcam images monitored by the intelligence agency under the Orwellian “Optic Nerve” program contained “undesirable nudity.”
But some were innocent, because the “pornography detectors” often misread people’s faces as evidence of nudity, the paper said.
The agency also warned staffers not to share the salacious videos, threatening disciplinary action against anyone caught doing so.
The program is reminiscent of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” in which telescreens in people’s homes can be monitored by an all-powerful government headed by a figure known as “Big Brother.”
NSA staffers also likely had access to the data because the agencies share information.
Surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because “Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets,” the report said.
In a statement to the Guardian, Yahoo condemned the Optic Nerve program.
“We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity,” a spokeswoman said.
“This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world’s governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.
“We are committed to preserving our users’ trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services.”