Guardian: Big Brother is watching you (via your webcam)

Screenshot/Yahoo

Guardian: Big Brother is watching you (via your webcam)
(Image credit: Screenshot/Yahoo)

Aided by the National Security Agency, Britain's GCHQ spy agency collected webcam images — many of them sexually explicit — from millions of innocent Yahoo chat users around the world, according to The Guardian. The program, code named Optic Nerve, reportedly scooped up images from more than 1.8 million users in a six-month period in 2008 alone. Yahoo claimed it had no prior knowledge of the operation, telling The Guardian it was a "whole new level of violation of our users' privacy."

Read the entire report over at The Guardian.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
Jon Terbush

Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.