Camera phones are IN!
With the new mobile phones sporting integrated cameras, users can email or post pictures on websites.
That’s why concerns about privacy, industrial espionage and even pornography notwithstanding, they’re hot – very hot.
About five million have been sold in the US and some American authorities want bans on camera phones in locker rooms and other locations.
“The basic issue surrounds public space voyeurism,” Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre, a privacy activist group, is quoted as saying in an AFP story here.
Hoofnagle said that rapidly moving technology is prompting a need to revisit basic laws on privacy, which were first enacted in response to the evolution of film photography.
“We don’t think the technology should be banned, but there should be observed norms for usage of the cameras, because there is a potential not just to take the picture but to transmit it quickly over the Internet,” he says.
“An estimated 65 million camera phones were sold worldwide in 2003, with Japan and South Korea the leading markets, according to Strategy Analytics, a market research firm which notes that camera phones are now outpacing sales of digital cameras,” AFP states.
But, “in the United States and elsewhere, the proliferation of the new devices is raising worries that the camera phones, which look like ordinary mobile phones, could be used for nefarious purposes. Companies are grappling with the issue of banning camera phones to protect industrial secrets.”
