Cameraphones Could Get Less Candid
from the fixing-problems-by-causing-other-problems dept
Found over at Reiter's Wireless Weblog is the story that the Korean government is considering a law that would require cameraphones to make a "loud noise" to prevent people from having their photos taken secretly. This is, of course, in response to the myriad of recent stories about gyms, courts, and other public places trying to ban camera phones for fear of privacy violations. Of course, anyone who's really trying to take sneaky pictures will pretty quickly figure out some way to silence this noise. Besides, adding a noise for a single case (when privacy violations might occur) means that the noise will now be present in many cases when it's not appropriate. For example, it's considered bad etiquette to let your mobile phone ring during your kid's school play. However, taking pictures is going to be expected. If your phone emits a "loud noise" every time you take a picture of your kid, that's going to be annoying to everyone around you. This is a solution to a problem that isn't necessarily there, that's only going to cause other problems.
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Phone Photo Quality?
Most of the samples I've seen are very low quality, wide-angle shots that aren't really appropriate for recording your child's special events.
There are plenty of digital cameras already on the market that are very small and discrete and could easily be used in all the same situations and won't have the integral noise maker that legislation might require.
I don't know about you, but I don't spend too much time paying attention to what the people around me are doing in the locker room, so if they're 'taking notes' on their PDA with integral camera or 'sending a text message' on their camera phone, I'm probably not going to notice. Of course I'm an overweight, almost middle-aged guy, so I don't think too many people are going to want to see locker room photos of me...
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for pete's sake...
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