Always on — camera
June 22, 2003
knowitallgirl discusses the dark side of phonecams, as pointed up in the Phonecam Nation article from the latest Wired.
One thing that emergent technology is good at is creating vast grey areas between “right” and “wrong”…
Take P2P networking, which can be used to share copyrighted material as easily as material that can legally be shared legitimately. When you put this technology in the hands of the people, you suddenly find out how they really feel about copyright.
Despite the RIAA and Orrin Hatch, enforcement appears to be in a losing tail-chase in the fight to stuff this genie back in the bottle. Assuming that they don’t manage to do so, one of these days we’re going to have to deal with the fact that the current copyright laws are both unpopular and unenforceable, and will need to be revised before they become yet another tool to selectively apply probable cause in cases where “profiling” is unpopular.
Ask anyone who lived through the ‘60s—“No your honor, I didn’t search his car because of his long hair and Deadhead bumpersticker—I searched it because he was driving 56 in a 55 mph zone.”
The next grey area bugaboo is shaping up to be the digital camera. Without consumables like film or commercial photo processing, the incremental cost of shooting a photo drops to zero, in the same manner that photocopiers reduced print reproduction cost and cd-ripping technology made digital music copying simple, fast and cheap.
Add in unobtrusiveness and ubiquitous presence (it’s getting hard to buy a sophisticated PDA or mobile phone without a camera embedded), and you’ve got a recipe for change.
Just as with P2P technology, many people are approaching this new situation not from the standpoint of “What am I allowed to do here?”, but from the standpoint of “What can I get away with?”
It doesn’t take much of a look around the online photo album sites to conclude that there are a lot of really candid shots being taken and distributed without model releases.
This isn’t going away anytime soon—small and innocent-looking cameras are getting cheaper and better, and finding their way into a lot of pockets, in phones, pdas, and even on keyrings.
Much like the situation with file sharing, I’m personally not sure if this is a good or bad thing—I’ve always been of the mind that if a law is vastly unpopular, it probably needs to be changed. Perhaps some of our privacy laws need to be examined too; only time will tell how popular opinion is going to go on this.
One thing that I am certain about is that for the time being, it probably behooves us to assume that we just might be on camera when we least expect it…
(via Marc’s Voice)
I hate to encourage more paranoia than what’s already out there, but I completely agree—when in public, assume you’re being filmed. Hopefully if you’re caught on camera it’s no more harmful than being caught in the act of picking your nose, but to assume that in public areas you have a bubble of privacy surrounding you is naive.