Telescope is a bad analogy. This is more like the neighbor is inadvertently projecting a feed from inside their house onto a display outside by the sidewalk for any passers-by to see.
This isn’t a passive “walked by the window” thing that you might have unwittingly viewed. To actively search for open cameras by crawling every IP then creating a tool to see them, then choosing to watch the footage is a very active, deliberate choice. No one is viewing this footage without making a multi-step choice to view it.
Don't confuse the creators and maintainers with people who click on a link out of curiosity. I also briefly "walked by the window" glancing at cats using automated feeders in china when someone posted that page to HN recently.
I'm surprised this is still a thing though. I remember being shocked when I came across an extensive feed of these inadvertently pubic CCTV feeds ~15 years ago. I had assumed it was no longer a problem.
Everything is a bad analogy, because the internet has something like 6 billion of us on it these days.
We evolved for small tribes, e.g. Dunbar's number is ~150. Roughly 1/129 of the people on the internet are software developers, so in the days of everyone living in villages your in-group would include roughly one person who thinks like we think.
"Inadvertently live-streaming to the 1/129 of the world who consider searches like this to be trivial, with zero feedback unless you found your home accidentally went viral" is not like anything we otherwise experience.
If anything, projecting onto a nearby sidewalk as you describe is more like "I was bathing after my day's work scribing for the king and wouldn't you know it, that 𒈗𒍠𒄀𒋛 living by the temple decided to walk right in and say hi! Doesn't even think to knock, just opened my front door and walked right in.", while the closest thing you can find to accidental live webcams in old writing is gods spying on mortals for fun, making us the Anansi, the Loki, the Eshu. And for the furries, the Coyote.
Not closing the blinds on the window you can't see that looks out onto an invisible street that only exists from your perspective as some sort of abstract concept. Also your "window" isn't readily visible from a distance someone has to go stumbling around in the dark and find it by physically running into it.
In other news I'm considering developing a new app and was wondering about VC funding. It's for mapping out ladders adjacent to windows down back alleys. I think it would dovetail well with nipalert.
This isn’t a passive “walked by the window” thing that you might have unwittingly viewed. To actively search for open cameras by crawling every IP then creating a tool to see them, then choosing to watch the footage is a very active, deliberate choice. No one is viewing this footage without making a multi-step choice to view it.