Salonaz Sami on how mobile phone cameras can cause distress When camera phones were first introduced into the market in mid-2003, it seemed a delightful idea. The gadget that you could keep on you at all times -- an affordable, convenient and highly portable item -- now allowed you the freedom not only to record but (through a server integrated with the carrier network) to share treasured moments, even videos. Simple as it sounded, in practice the idea turned out to be rather more complicated -- with its own risk profile. "Camera phones turned into a menace to privacy when people started abusing them," Mohamed El-Messiri, a computer engineer, explained. "The ability to take a picture and then immediately send it to someone else -- that kind of technology certainly can be misused." Many women feel that such ease and immediacy is potentially intrusive. According to Nadia El-Mohamadi, 38, "those phones are a curse on society. People worldwide have been charged with taking photos of women, or men for that matter -- in gym locker rooms, store dressing rooms, or swimming pools." Some went so far as to slip the phone under the door to ladies' toilet cubicle, El-Mohamadi added. Sara Hussein, a younger accountant, agreed: "if I go to a club or a restaurant, anyone can take my picture without my knowledge and transmit it to the rest of the world; a rather disturbing idea." Indeed in the US, a ban was placed on using camera phones in certain public venues. In Japan and South Korea, manufacturers are obliged to make the phones in such a way that they make an audible click every time a photo is taken. Saudi Arabia banned their use across the country in 2004. El-Messiri explained that the laws and regulations covering camera phones in Egypt, as indeed in much of the world, are vague and ineffective: "existing laws deal with stalking, harassment, people making a nuisance of themselves -- no laws regulate camera phone use as such." Camera phones, he went on to argue, are an instance of applying new technology to an existing privacy problem: "they don't raise new privacy concerns; they are the same as any small camera, which has always existed. The problem is rather that they have enabled the taking and publishing of photographs without consent." A similar point can be made about copyright violations in performance and art spaces and movie theatres, where photography is often prohibited. Still, many feel that the poor quality of the pictures and videos taken by a camera phone should be a sufficient safeguard. Riad Said, a Cairo University student says, "I don't think that the picture quality on my phone,can be compared to any professional camera -- I don't believe I would be violating copyright by simply filming a few seconds of a concert I attended, for instance." And camera phones can play a potent role in crime prevention, journalism, business and individual applications. On 17 January New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg actually announced a plan encouraging people to use their camera phones to capture crimes in progress, or dangerous situations, and send them to an emergency hotline. Perhaps not so surprisingly, much of the debate has focused on the video capabilities of camera phones -- which are said to have opened up a new arena of illegal videotaping. "A perfect example is that of Saddam Hussein's execution," El-Mohamadi says. "Within hours of the event, the video taken by one of the guards was all over the Internet." In Egypt, too, the gadgets came to the fore when several camera phone videos showing police brutality made their way into the media via the Internet, causing a major uproar. The first showed Emad El-Kebir, a minibus driver, sexually abused inside a police station while being interrogated; two officers were detained on 27 December on charges of sexual assault after the video was posted on the web. The second, a still of which ran on the front page of the independent newspaper Al-Masry Al-Yom, showed a screaming woman confessing to murder while tied to a bar hung between two chairs -- she has not been identified. The third video, which resulted in the detention of two other police officers, showed a young man being beaten repeatedly on the back of the head during an interrogation. Why and how these videos were shot remains a mystery, but they have undoubtedly exposed police violations, in an unprecedented way. Mohamed Khaled, 24, whose blog first posted the video of El-Kebir, said he found it by chance in a neighbour's collection of phone videos: "the video has received 33,000 hits. It has also migrated to YouTube, the global video-sharing website with millions of viewers all over the world. You post it, someone else posts it further -- before you know it the video is circulating and it's too late." The issue is even more heated where celebrities are involved -- cameras have been a curse, inducing an often explicit invasion of privacy for Arab female figures in the entertainment business Likewise with corporate spying. As Karim Mansour, a corporate employee puts it, "this is an ongoing issue, and it is something that large companies have been trying to tackle for a while now: sensitive information snapped and sent off has prompted many large companies -- Intel, for example -- to ban camera phones from their buildings to protect their secrets." Even when it is discovered, a piece of information caught unawares has already reached the media -- unlike the case of a digital camera, which simply stores images for later transfer. Yet the gadgets are more popular than ever, the attempt to abolish their influence having proven more or less fruitless. They are too small, too numerous, and too easy to hide. In 2006, indeed, more camera phones than digital cameras were sold worldwide. The predictions are that, by the end of 2007, half of the mobile phones sold in the world will be camera phones; by 2008, over one billion camera phones will be sold. El-Messiri says, "Ten per cent of the mobile phones shipped into Egypt have the technology enabling them to take clear, quality photos and in the near future that proportion will at least double." And while technology advances, societies are grappling with the implications. In London, work is in progress on a new platform named "safe haven", which can disable the camera functions on a phone within a certain radius while leaving all other functions operational. The technology has yet to be approved for use, however -- and until it is, no one knows for certain what camera phones will produce, or what distress they might enegender.
