What is wrong with these people? You know, the people like the guy in this article who took pictures of his naked girlfriend without her knowledge, then posted them to his website? The only reason he got busted was because she was only 17--underage in Canada, where this happened. The other women he'd harrassed in the same way have no legal recourse, it sounds like, because this is not yet against the law.
Can you imagine if the soldiers who took the infamous Iraq prison shots had been using camera phones and instantly uploading them to a website, or e-mailing them to their friends?
Can you imagine someone sneaking one into the VIP lounge to instantly record and send images and words that your organization's leaders perhaps would have preferred to keep amongst themselves?
Or using one of these things in the rest room at your conference, then beaming the images to a real-time blog and labeling them, "This show was a real p****r"?
I won't even get into the whole area of industrial espionage, where the implications are huge and growing. I don't know if it's the dependence we have on TV, especially the "reality" shows where you get to drop in on--and judge--total strangers or what, but there's something wrong with this picture, and it really, really ticks me off. Illinois is working on it, according to this article, and probably many other states and countries are as well.
But making it illegal to snap and disseminate an image of someone without their knowledge could work against the only legitimate possible use of these things I can think of: Taking a picture of someone committing a crime, where the picture-taker obviously wouldn't want to tap the criminal's shoulder and say, "Excuse me, do you mind if I take your photo and send it to the local police?" Could the criminal then turn around and sue the do-gooder? Just wait, I bet it'll happen before too long.
I have no answers, but after reading those two articles and thinking about the ads for these camera phones that make voyeurism look like fun, I have a lot of outrage and had to vent it somewhere. Thanks for listening (the next post will have something to do with business, I promise).
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