Camera Phones Exposed

There you are, bending over at the wave pool in your Speedo or bikini in the most unflattering pose possible and the next thing you know – *click* – someone has published your picture on the Internet. Chances are someone snapped that picture with a cam-phone, a mobile phone with a built-in digital camera.

Cam-phones are being made by all the major mobile phone manufactureres these days. They integrate a tiny lens and digital camera chip into a phone in such a James Bond way that you can’t tell if someone is looking up their accountant’s phone number or framing you in their viewfinder.

Once someone stores the image in the camera, they can send it wirelessly across the cellular phone network to other phones or e-mail it to the world.

Perhaps you got a Thighmaster during the holidays and don’t mind being photographed in your beach attire, but what happens if you’re in the changing room at the gym with your skivvies on the floor and someone secretly pulls out their camera-phone?

It’s a real problem. YMCA facilities in Australia have banned cam-phone use, so have the YMCA in Calgary and other fitness facilities. Many in the US have followed suit.

Meanwhile, Japan is way ahead of North America with 25 million camera phones on the streets…and mayhem has ensued. Japan’s magazine publishers association has mailed out 34,000 posters to bookstores asking people not to take pictures of magazine articles with their cam-phones. There are also stories of men being arrested for snapping shots up women’s skirts.

It’s a problem that’s not going to go away.

The ARC Group, a technology research firm, predicted there would be 130 million handsets with camera capability shipping worldwide by 2005 and, when faster wireless data networks come online in the next few years, that will grow to 210 million by 2008.

With that growth, I’m sure we’ll see similar news stories in Canada as the devices catch on here. We may be a nation of nice people, but we still have our contingent of perverts.

Picture quality on the devices is no better than a webcam. You’re looking at 640×480 pixels, which is enough for a large image (about 8×6 inches) on your computer display. That quality is not good enough to print out on paper, but still, a naked picture is a naked picture.

So what to do? Well, what did we do when porn started appearing on the Internet? Nothing much. Perhaps we became a little more desensitized to graphic imagery and worried about our children’s exposure to the smut. Maybe we used technology to fight technology and bought software to filter out the naughty stuff.

Mostly, people will ignore the cam-phone deviants and adapt their modesty. Of course, there will be technology fixes, too. Two UK companies, Sensaura and Iceberg Systems, have together developed a method of disabling the camera component in mobile phones. A camera disabling technology is built into a cam-phone, which responds to a wireless signal sent by another device. Facilities like fitness centers could buy gear to activate the signal. The two companies say they are in talks with cellular phone manufacturers to get their solution into handsets.

Still, the news about cam-phones isn’t all bad. The majority of cam-phone owners are photographing their families, posing their pets, and using the devices to show the Home Depot guy what connector they need for the dishwasher.

The cameras have been used to nab criminals, too. Not so long ago, a 15-year-old New Jersey boy was accosted by a man in a car, so the teen snapped pictures of him and his car’s license plate with his camera phone and then escaped, found his older brother and together they delivered the pictures to the police. Later, an arrest was made in connection with the crime.

Soon though, it won’t just be stills. Coming to cellular phones will be movie camera capability on mobile handsets.

Sure enough that too will be used for good, and for bad. The question remains: Will you film your visit to the Paris Hilton? Or become her?