"She just went to sleep on the bed, and you heard the kids crying and crying in the background," San Filippo recalls. "I didn't have to find another thing after that. That was enough to say, 'I'm going to have to let you go.'"

With their confidence shaken, the San Filippos -- who had already gone through several other less-than-adequate nannies --decided not to take another chance. Bill left his job to stay home with the kids.

While it is legal in many states to videotape someone in your own home without dual-party consent -- federal laws curtailing the use of audio taping is the only pertinent law currently on the books, and its application to nanny cams is murky at best -- nanny cams do raise thorny privacy issues.

Jay Stanley, spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty program, says the lack of legislation regulating the use of nanny cams and other forms of covert surveillance reflects our legal system's inability to keep pace with technology. "It takes the laws a while to digest" new technology and new uses for existing technology, he says, adding that there is an "aching need" in the United States for a "comprehensive overarching law that establishes some broad principles of privacy."

The use of nanny cams, Stanley says, runs contrary to our societal principles of fairness. "People should not be monitored without their knowledge and consent," he contends. "Most baby sitters are not harming children and they have a right to a certain amount of dignity."

Stanley concedes that, because they are protecting children, nanny cams may be "the best case you can make" for covert surveillance, but that their increasingly widespread use nevertheless challenges the "overarching privacy principles that have served us well across a wide variety of fields and that express basic notions of fairness."

Stanley's argument is not lost on Carrie O'Neill (not her real name), 42, a New York writer, psychologist and mother of a 1-year-old whose nanny was cammed by a previous employer without her knowledge. The information gleaned from the previous employer's nanny cam and imparted to O'Neill when she called to check references -- that the nanny was even better with the kids when the parents had left the house than when the parents were there -- felt "like insurance."

But as profoundly relieved as she is to know that her babysitter looked as good on camera as off, O'Neill says she feels "totally guilty about being the beneficiary" of an action she considers deceitful.

"It might occur to me to want to do it, but I would never do it," she says. "It strikes me as something profoundly wrong to do to somebody without their consent. It's a violation."

For nannies, this erosion of privacy is not just theoretical. It's personal. And it deeply concerns Pat Cascio, president of the International Nanny Association, which discourages covert camming.

"What if a nanny is feeding a baby and the baby spits up all over her," she says. "She takes off her blouse and possibly even her slacks to go launder them and now you've got a tape that you're watching of her in her underwear. That's not fair."

What's more, Cascio says she's not surprised that so many covert cammers find something bad going on at home. "These are people who already suspect something is going wrong," she says. If there's any doubt in parents' minds that their employee is doing her job, Cascio says, "I would suggest replacing her immediately rather than trying to catch her at something."

But interestingly, while Cascio is no fan of camming "on the sneak," she does think the camera can have a place in the nanny-parent relationship.

"If the parents approach this in a positive light and say we're going to use this as an evaluation tool as well as to keep connected to the baby and how he or she spends her day," Cascio says, "I think then the nanny could say, 'I think that's good. You can't be there, but I'd love to have you see him take his first steps or see how much he had to eat today or how funny he was when he made this face or whatever.' Then it's a relationship-building tool rather than something that destroys a relationship."

In fact, some nannies view camming as an insurance policy of their own.

"I'm all for cameras," says Mary, 23, an Irish nanny who has been in the States for four years and currently works for a family in Manhattan. "The way I see it, it's covering my back, too."

A few years ago, Mary says, she took a job for a family knowing that there was a camera in the house. The couple who hired her didn't tell her and had no idea that Mary knew it was there. She'd been tipped off by the family's prior nanny.

"I was actually glad it was there because one of the kids had attention deficit disorder and she was constantly beating up on her younger sister," says Mary. "One day, the older one pushed the younger one and the younger one pushed her back and they both turned to me and said, 'We're telling my mommy you hit us.' I was like, oh my God. So in that case it was excellent that it was there."

Mary, who now works for a couple she calls her "best friends," says she'd be hurt if her current employers installed a camera without telling her because it would indicate a lack of trust, but if they put one in and told her, she says, she'd be "quite happy."

"To me, not being from the United States, I don't have a lot of rights in this country compared to what I would have in my own country. If there'd been a camera in the Louise Woodward case, they would have been able to pinpoint what happened to that little child," she says, alluding to the controversial case in which a British nanny was convicted of murdering the 8-month-old boy under her care (the charge was later reduced to involuntary manslaughter).

But not all nannies are as gung-ho about cameras as Mary. Take Paola Di Marco, 27, a nanny from Argentina who cares for small children for several families in Brooklyn. She says she can see the value of a camera to parents, but admits she'd be horrified -- for reasons that have nothing to do with her childcare skills -- if she found out she'd been secretly monitored by an employer.

"If nobody tells you there's a camera there," she says, "that's crossing a line."

Di Marco worries about parents watching her in private moments. For example, "sometimes I might hike up my panties when the kids are around because I know they don't care," she says. "But if I know that then his or her parents can see me do that? You have the right to control what someone sees you do."

Ultimately, Cascio says, if parents really do their research, hire well and watch for cues from their child, they won't "need to be sneaking around putting cameras on" their nannies.

But what about the Barrons? They interviewed, checked references, saw the nanny interacting well with their child. Could their situation have been avoided?

Jake says that in retrospect there were some red flags: the nanny's allusion to having had an abusive parent, the controlling husband who accompanied her to the interview, and the general feeling that Jake and Anna couldn't shake that something was not quite right. They might have overlooked these things, Jake admits, because they were so desperate for someone to care for Evan.

The next time the Barrons looked for a nanny, however, they played it safe. They hired a woman they knew, who had cared for a neighbor's child, and who they had seen interact with children for years. They loved her. Evan loved her. And no, they didn't cam her. Says Jake: "We just didn't feel the need."

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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