Phones make your bad side visible to world

Phones make your bad side visible to world
By Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Cell phones that allow people to capture photographic images that can be sent to other users and posted on the Internet are becoming the hottest new electronic gadget.
Adam Seifer is photographed taking pictures with his video camera-telephone device while walking in Manhattan.
Todd Plitt, USA TODAY

But as the use of "picture mail" spreads, so does concern about privacy and propriety. And because the phones can be used to surreptitiously capture images of people in compromising positions, some steps already are being taken to restrict their use:

• The phones have been banned from the locker rooms of The Sports Club/LA, which owns nine upscale gyms in Los Angeles, New York and other cities.

• Seven Hills, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, may soon pass legislation that would bar their use in bathrooms and other private areas of public buildings.

•And Rolling Stone magazine honored a request by pop star Britney Spears to confiscate all cell phones at a recent party in New York. That has prompted speculation that the phones could be banned at other social gatherings attended by celebrities.

The phones allow users to take pictures and send them to other camera phones. The images also can be downloaded to computers and sent over the Internet.

About 80 million of the palm-sized camera phones are in use worldwide, mostly in Europe and Asia. They are fairly new in the USA; fewer than 6 million are in use in North America. But falling prices — they now average about $380 — and improving picture quality are likely to spur growth.

Critics warn that as the phones proliferate, they are turning users into would-be paparazzi, with anyone nearby potential prey.

"They certainly raise a new possibility of invasions of privacy in settings where that has not traditionally been an issue," says David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington D.C., which examines technology's impact on privacy and civil liberties.

Fears over their use are based on what has happened overseas. In Asia and Western Europe, photos of nude women taken by camera phones are proliferating on the Internet. In China, a rapist used a camera phone to photograph the victim and threatened to expose her to ridicule if she went to authorities. Worried about industrial espionage, camera phone manufacturer Samsung has banned their use in some of its own factories, according to the market research firm Strategy Analytics.

The potential for unsuspecting people to be shown in humiliating situations, with their images transmitted to millions, is especially unsettling, says James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers University in New Jersey. "It's that unknown use and potential misuse that disturbs us," Katz says. "We diet and go to the gym so we appear attractive to other people, even strangers. Suddenly we're not able to take the same kind of care about public presentation of ourselves that we'd like because of these mobile phones. They can be used to capture people at their worst or most embarrassing."

Some technology has been introduced to alert the unsuspecting. In Japan, for example, some camera phones make a warning noise when a picture is being taken, Strategy Analytics senior analyst Neil Mawston says.

Although it is unlikely that camera phone technology would ever be banned, some analysts suspect that restrictions could mushroom as people become more aware of potential misuse.

Buck naked?

David Bentkowski, the Seven Hills city councilman who introduced the proposed restrictions in his town last week, discovered the new phones only a few weeks ago, when a friend pulled one out at a football game.

"A few days later, I was working out at the rec center and a guy was using his cell phone," Bentkowski says. "I'm buck-naked, and (I'm thinking), 'This guy could be taking my picture.' "

Bentkowski says the phones should not be allowed in certain public places. But he also says he appreciates the technology, and how, for example, it might enable him to immediately transmit a picture of a constituent's dilapidated home to the town's building commission.

The camera phone's potential for good is profound, too.

In Scotland, rescue workers use the phones to transmit pictures of accident victims to doctors while en route to hospitals, Mawston says. Camera phones were used to photograph a rape in England, and the pictures were turned over to police for evidence, Katz says.

About 2% of the 20,000 photos now posted each day on the Web site Fotolog.net, which allows people to create their own photo journals or share their pictures with others, are taken by camera phones. That number is rapidly increasing, site co-founder Adam Seifer says.

"People don't leave their house without a phone," says Seifer, who just purchased his camera phone. "So they'll never miss those cool little moments that emerge throughout the day."

The Web site has rules against lewd and inappropriate photos, but Seifer doesn't see the camera phone as any more intrusive than more traditional cameras.

"People have had cameras for over 100 years and have taken pictures of strangers they've posted in a variety of formats," he says. "I don't think there's any more or less invasion of privacy happening."

Gary Dann, 23, of Philadelphia, who has had a camera phone for about a year, admits that on a couple of occasions, he has used his Samsung V205 to snap a picture of someone in an unflattering moment — like the "total jerk" at the grocery store who was needlessly yelling at a teenage cashier. More typically, Dann says, he photographs sunsets and moments of his own life. He sees the tiny cameras as tools for art and journalism rather than exploitation.

"It gives the average Joe a voice," says Dann, who has kept an online photo journal for about a year. "Now Joe Schmo in Wisconsin can make a Web page, and the whole world can see it."

New privacy fears

At a time when ordinary people parade their private lives on television for fame and fortune — and when government surveillance has increased in response to crime and terrorism — many Americans have gotten used to being watched, privacy experts say. But they may also be growing weary and ready to rebel.

"People are feeling inhibited because of this sense of being under surveillance, whether it's security cameras in stores or increasingly surveillance in public places," says Sobel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"The public is approaching a breaking point with respect to privacy violations generally, so I could certainly see some movement to penalize certain uses" of camera phones, he says.

Courts traditionally have held that people do not have an expectation of privacy in public places, although privacy experts say camera phones may test that idea. If the people being photographed are not involved in a newsworthy event, they might argue that their privacy was violated if the photographer made money from the shot or the picture negatively affected them, Katz says.

"It will be more a matter of penalizing particular uses in particular circumstances," Sobel says. "Pictures taken in settings that we all would deem to carry an expectation of privacy —like a bathroom, like a dressing room, like a locker room — are probably likely to be the first cases that we do see."