The Times Magazine: Spies like us - how camera phones change everything
Spies like us
The camera-equipped mobile phone is set to be the big seller this Christmas, promoted as the latest must-have in the new age of personal communications. But recent reports suggest that the uses to which these cameras are being put are often far removed from the manufacturers' original intentions. From sexual voyeurism to crime detection and news-gathering, the phones are having a profound social impact. And, in a world already awash with surveillance technology, they seem set finally to spell the end of privacy
By David Rowan
Daniel McLarney is a new kind of publisher. Picture-savvy and web-literate, McLarney, 27, considers the raw spontaneity of a snatched street-scene close-up to be infinitely more seductive than any professionally enhanced studio shot. Since he launched his photographic website in June, he has attracted hundreds of unpaid contributors armed with the latest camera-equipped mobile phones. Lurking behind women in streets or workplaces from Southampton to Sydney, they have sent the site more than 10,000 photographs, all taken in secret, the demand for which is now strong enough for McLarney to contemplate a £12 subscription fee. And although he is at pains to stress that these images of unsuspecting strangers are in no way pornographic, he makes no apologies for the site's particular anatomical focus. It is, after all, called MobileAsses.com.
"I won't use photographs taken in certain private situations such as locker-rooms, but in a world increasingly dominated by camphones it's a promise that's hard to fulfil," says McLarney. Instead, his site - slogan: "The real reason mobile phones have cameras" - encourages its hundreds of thousands of visitors to rate the month's sexiest images, with T-shirts and e-mail accounts on offer to the winners. Recent awards have gone to "Johnny Crunch" of Budapest (for snaps of catwalk models parading in leopard-skin bikinis), "Blaster" in the Dutch city of Nijmegen (shoppers wearing tight white jeans and faded denim) and Laurent from Paris (a tanned woman in minimalist lingerie apparently in the process of dressing). There is, however, "no nudity", as the submission rules helpfully state, "but G-strings are great!"
Last year, about 16 million camphones were sold around the world. This year, the total is predicted to be more than 60 million - a couple of million of them in Britain, although the manufacturers will not make precise estimates. But with handsets equipped for video and stills photography destined to be Christmas best-sellers, this newest communications technology is having a profound social impact. Just as texting has changed the way we write, flirt and pay bills, so picture and video-messaging are making an impact on everything from news-gathering and crime-detection to sexual voyeurism. For the first time, anyone with a camera-enabled phone, such as the Ericsson T610 or the Sharp GX10, can publish images instantly and relatively cheaply to a potentially global audience. As these phones become ubiquitous - they are already outselling digital cameras - we will all fall into their range on every street corner.
And there appears to be nothing we can do to protect our privacy.
This is not yet something that bothers Daniel McLarney, whose Los Angeles-based website has still to face its first legal challenge for breaching a subject's privacy. "If someone e-mailed me saying they'd seen their ass on my site and objected, and could prove it, then I'd take it down immediately," he insists, adding that most women he talks to "want to see their pictures there as they're curious about how other people would rate them". But other picture-messaging websites are pushing the boundaries to the limit. Last month, one British-based site published seven blurry images purporting to be "two international footballers and a mystery girl engaging in the activity known as 'roasting'". The sexually explicit photographs, all faces obscured, were said to have been uploaded to the site from "an international footballer's Nokia 3650".
Sex was never far from the phone networks' business plans when they launched what is technically called the multimedia messaging service (MMS). That was clear from their suggestible ad campaigns encouraging us to "muck about", and from the deals they struck with pornographers to offer paid-for downloads. But for all the grand corporate marketing scenarios, this has become mostly a grassroots revolution. It has been Japanese schoolgirl prostitutes, and Hong Kong pimps who have adopted picture-messaging to advertise their particular services. And rather than simply pay to download celebrity photos, as the networks intended, users have discovered that camphones turn us all into potential paparazzi.
This is why Britney Spears demanded that all camphones be confiscated before she appeared at a recent press party, and why Prince partied at the Embassy nightclub in London only after his minders had first frisked guests to ensure that he would be out of picture range. To celebrities used to controlling their visual image, the new phones represent chaos. For every magazine promising picture approval, there is now a website such as Buzznet.com packed with user-submitted camphone snaps of Janet Jackson in a restaurant, Jay Leno revving his motorbike down an LA highway, and an unkempt Randy Newman watching a tennis match. Even politicians are targets: the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, recently complained that he could not go for a drink without risking being phone-snapped. "You've somebody lurking behind the back of a wall at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night to take a picture of me (to) sell it to the newspaper," he said. "And there's nothing you can do about it."
In a world where a grainy image can dominate the news agenda - remember the footage of a Palestinian boy dodging Israeli bullets? - we are suddenly all potential news reporters. When 12 cars were involved in a fatal accident on the Tomei Expressway in Japan this June, the first television footage came from a lorry driver's videophone. During President Bush's recent state visit to London, anti-war activists used camphones to monitor police movements in real-time on "mobile weblogs". "Soon, an event of major proportions is going to happen on the streets of London or Tokyo or Helsinki, and millions of people will see photographs and even video via the internet before the world press arrives," says Howard Rheingold, an early web visionary whose book Smart Mobs predicted the social revolution fuelled by camphones. By turning us from passive TV viewers into active media communicators, Rheingold sees the technology creating "a new literacy of internet publishing" - just as Gutenberg's press inspired a new print-based literacy.
For the award-winning fashion photographer Nick Knight, the revolution has already arrived. Three years ago, Knight set up SHOWstudio.com, a London-based website for "broadcasting" new work in art, fashion and design. At this year's couture shows, its photographers used camphones to beam catwalk images instantly to a large international audience. "You can take these cameras anywhere, flick the button and be published globally in an instant," Knight says excitedly. "Before, all our information had to be channelled through money-making companies such as record firms, publishing houses or art galleries, filtered through people who decided what you could and couldn't see. Now you have a truly democratic way of speaking to other human beings."
Having photographed numerous covers for Vogue and The Face, as well as album covers for David Bowie and Bjoerk, Knight now favours camphones over his other cameras. He is not bothered by the images' relative fuzziness. "I really don't mind that," he says. "It's the message of a photo that's important. Besides, there's a certain quality to a camphone image - a particular beauty in the light. They have a very painterly feeling."
Since the first camphone, the Sharp J-SH04, was launched in November 2000, it has been the technology's more nefarious potential that has dominated media coverage. In an effort to protect children, camphones have been banned in swimming pools from Bolton to Brisbane, after changing-room images were discovered on the internet. In Japan, the use of the phones to take "upskirt" photographs on commuter trains is fast rising. Last summer, videophones also prompted lurid headlines when police claimed that one had been used to film an alleged rape in a Brighton pub. But Emily Turrettini, who monitors the industry for the news site Picturephoning.com, thinks the fears are grossly exaggerated. "Let's not panic," Turrettini says. "You'll always get some people misusing a new technology, but the threat is blown out of proportion. We've got politicians clamouring to ban them by law from public changing rooms, when it would be more sensible simply to put up a notice."
Instead, Turrettini suggests, we should celebrate this new medium for recording everyday life - as Jonathan Margolis shows each week in his "Random" column for this magazine - and even the phones' potential for exposing wrongdoing. "Sooner or later there will be a videophone equivalent of Rodney King (whose brutal beating by Los Angeles police in 1991, captured on video, led to charges being brought against four officers)."
Sam Gedeon, for one, is grateful for the technology's ability to support law and order. One evening last April, Gedeon, 45, was at his grocery shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, when a youth walked in threatening violence if he did not hand over 100 kronor (£7.80). Thinking quickly, Gedeon remembered his Nokia 7650, which he had left in an upstairs office. After telling the robber that he had to go upstairs to fetch the cash, Gedeon returned with the phone and photographed him as he banged on the counter. Gedeon then used his computer to print out the image for the local police.
Within half an hour, the suspect had been found in a nearby restaurant. In July, a 15-year-old was convicted of attempted robbery and sentenced to youth detention. The prosecutor, Peeter Aaw, said it was the first time a camphone image had been used as evidence in court.
Camphones have also led to arrests in a foiled child abduction in New Jersey, a Japanese hit-and-run and a recent burglary in Manchester. Chief Superintendent Ian Alexander, a divisional commander with Tayside Police, is convinced that the phones will become a vital weapon in the war against crime. So far, the Tayside force has used the phones mainly to catch graffiti taggers and record non-standard car number-plates, but Alexander sees huge possibilities for increasing covert surveillance of suspects. In five months, he says, the phones have led to 40 arrests. "These phones are very powerful tools," he says. "They're already increasing detection rates significantly - our vandalism detection rate is up 18 per cent this year. The technology is a key part of speeding things up."
When officers see a fresh graffiti tag on a street wall, they send an image in real time by phone to the crime management desk. Intelligence officers then search for a match on the internal database. "We also go into schools, and record logos that we find on school blotters," says Alexander. "So we'll know that this tag was done by Jimmy Smith in 4B." The technique may seem intrusive - a child, certainly, would not expect their schoolbook scribbles to find their way on to a police database - but the force insists it is preventing hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of damage.
But as quickly as the police are discovering new uses for the phones, criminals are also adapting the technology. Last April, the National Criminal Intelligence Service reported that paedophiles in central Scotland had been caught swapping indecent images over the phone networks. On Alexander's own Tayside beat, drug-dealers are using them to exchange written messages about the next deal, rather than risk phone conversations. "They think their picture messages are safe from interception, unlike voice calls," he says. "If they want to think that, it's fine with us."
As for personal privacy, the spread of camphone use - among those on both sides of the law - is fast rewriting the rules. Some US states have now introduced a new offence of "video voyeurism" to penalise those who distribute salacious images of strangers without their knowledge; Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice has banned the phones entirely, and South Korea has legislated to ensure that the phones click loudly when an image is captured. In Britain, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 has established a new crime of "voyeurism", with up to two years in jail for anyone caught "operating equipment" that records other people's private activities for sexual gratification. But it will take clarification to determine exactly what a "private act", under the new legislation, will mean in practice - and whether MobileAsses.com will find its British contributors risking jail.
Howard Rheingold thinks there is no longer any point even in talking about visual privacy. "There are 25 million closed-circuit television cameras bolted to buildings, and I have seen prototypes of inexpensive wireless video webcams the size of an aspirin," he says. "Between camphones, security cams, and your neighbour's or spouse's desire to spy on you, I expect that our current ideas of visual privacy are doomed."
(The Times Magazine, December 13 2003)
The camera-equipped mobile phone is set to be the big seller this Christmas, promoted as the latest must-have in the new age of personal communications. But recent reports suggest that the uses to which these cameras are being put are often far removed from the manufacturers' original intentions. From sexual voyeurism to crime detection and news-gathering, the phones are having a profound social impact. And, in a world already awash with surveillance technology, they seem set finally to spell the end of privacy
By David Rowan
Daniel McLarney is a new kind of publisher. Picture-savvy and web-literate, McLarney, 27, considers the raw spontaneity of a snatched street-scene close-up to be infinitely more seductive than any professionally enhanced studio shot. Since he launched his photographic website in June, he has attracted hundreds of unpaid contributors armed with the latest camera-equipped mobile phones. Lurking behind women in streets or workplaces from Southampton to Sydney, they have sent the site more than 10,000 photographs, all taken in secret, the demand for which is now strong enough for McLarney to contemplate a £12 subscription fee. And although he is at pains to stress that these images of unsuspecting strangers are in no way pornographic, he makes no apologies for the site's particular anatomical focus. It is, after all, called MobileAsses.com.
"I won't use photographs taken in certain private situations such as locker-rooms, but in a world increasingly dominated by camphones it's a promise that's hard to fulfil," says McLarney. Instead, his site - slogan: "The real reason mobile phones have cameras" - encourages its hundreds of thousands of visitors to rate the month's sexiest images, with T-shirts and e-mail accounts on offer to the winners. Recent awards have gone to "Johnny Crunch" of Budapest (for snaps of catwalk models parading in leopard-skin bikinis), "Blaster" in the Dutch city of Nijmegen (shoppers wearing tight white jeans and faded denim) and Laurent from Paris (a tanned woman in minimalist lingerie apparently in the process of dressing). There is, however, "no nudity", as the submission rules helpfully state, "but G-strings are great!"
Last year, about 16 million camphones were sold around the world. This year, the total is predicted to be more than 60 million - a couple of million of them in Britain, although the manufacturers will not make precise estimates. But with handsets equipped for video and stills photography destined to be Christmas best-sellers, this newest communications technology is having a profound social impact. Just as texting has changed the way we write, flirt and pay bills, so picture and video-messaging are making an impact on everything from news-gathering and crime-detection to sexual voyeurism. For the first time, anyone with a camera-enabled phone, such as the Ericsson T610 or the Sharp GX10, can publish images instantly and relatively cheaply to a potentially global audience. As these phones become ubiquitous - they are already outselling digital cameras - we will all fall into their range on every street corner.
And there appears to be nothing we can do to protect our privacy.
This is not yet something that bothers Daniel McLarney, whose Los Angeles-based website has still to face its first legal challenge for breaching a subject's privacy. "If someone e-mailed me saying they'd seen their ass on my site and objected, and could prove it, then I'd take it down immediately," he insists, adding that most women he talks to "want to see their pictures there as they're curious about how other people would rate them". But other picture-messaging websites are pushing the boundaries to the limit. Last month, one British-based site published seven blurry images purporting to be "two international footballers and a mystery girl engaging in the activity known as 'roasting'". The sexually explicit photographs, all faces obscured, were said to have been uploaded to the site from "an international footballer's Nokia 3650".
Sex was never far from the phone networks' business plans when they launched what is technically called the multimedia messaging service (MMS). That was clear from their suggestible ad campaigns encouraging us to "muck about", and from the deals they struck with pornographers to offer paid-for downloads. But for all the grand corporate marketing scenarios, this has become mostly a grassroots revolution. It has been Japanese schoolgirl prostitutes, and Hong Kong pimps who have adopted picture-messaging to advertise their particular services. And rather than simply pay to download celebrity photos, as the networks intended, users have discovered that camphones turn us all into potential paparazzi.
This is why Britney Spears demanded that all camphones be confiscated before she appeared at a recent press party, and why Prince partied at the Embassy nightclub in London only after his minders had first frisked guests to ensure that he would be out of picture range. To celebrities used to controlling their visual image, the new phones represent chaos. For every magazine promising picture approval, there is now a website such as Buzznet.com packed with user-submitted camphone snaps of Janet Jackson in a restaurant, Jay Leno revving his motorbike down an LA highway, and an unkempt Randy Newman watching a tennis match. Even politicians are targets: the Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, recently complained that he could not go for a drink without risking being phone-snapped. "You've somebody lurking behind the back of a wall at 11 o'clock on a Saturday night to take a picture of me (to) sell it to the newspaper," he said. "And there's nothing you can do about it."
In a world where a grainy image can dominate the news agenda - remember the footage of a Palestinian boy dodging Israeli bullets? - we are suddenly all potential news reporters. When 12 cars were involved in a fatal accident on the Tomei Expressway in Japan this June, the first television footage came from a lorry driver's videophone. During President Bush's recent state visit to London, anti-war activists used camphones to monitor police movements in real-time on "mobile weblogs". "Soon, an event of major proportions is going to happen on the streets of London or Tokyo or Helsinki, and millions of people will see photographs and even video via the internet before the world press arrives," says Howard Rheingold, an early web visionary whose book Smart Mobs predicted the social revolution fuelled by camphones. By turning us from passive TV viewers into active media communicators, Rheingold sees the technology creating "a new literacy of internet publishing" - just as Gutenberg's press inspired a new print-based literacy.
For the award-winning fashion photographer Nick Knight, the revolution has already arrived. Three years ago, Knight set up SHOWstudio.com, a London-based website for "broadcasting" new work in art, fashion and design. At this year's couture shows, its photographers used camphones to beam catwalk images instantly to a large international audience. "You can take these cameras anywhere, flick the button and be published globally in an instant," Knight says excitedly. "Before, all our information had to be channelled through money-making companies such as record firms, publishing houses or art galleries, filtered through people who decided what you could and couldn't see. Now you have a truly democratic way of speaking to other human beings."
Having photographed numerous covers for Vogue and The Face, as well as album covers for David Bowie and Bjoerk, Knight now favours camphones over his other cameras. He is not bothered by the images' relative fuzziness. "I really don't mind that," he says. "It's the message of a photo that's important. Besides, there's a certain quality to a camphone image - a particular beauty in the light. They have a very painterly feeling."
Since the first camphone, the Sharp J-SH04, was launched in November 2000, it has been the technology's more nefarious potential that has dominated media coverage. In an effort to protect children, camphones have been banned in swimming pools from Bolton to Brisbane, after changing-room images were discovered on the internet. In Japan, the use of the phones to take "upskirt" photographs on commuter trains is fast rising. Last summer, videophones also prompted lurid headlines when police claimed that one had been used to film an alleged rape in a Brighton pub. But Emily Turrettini, who monitors the industry for the news site Picturephoning.com, thinks the fears are grossly exaggerated. "Let's not panic," Turrettini says. "You'll always get some people misusing a new technology, but the threat is blown out of proportion. We've got politicians clamouring to ban them by law from public changing rooms, when it would be more sensible simply to put up a notice."
Instead, Turrettini suggests, we should celebrate this new medium for recording everyday life - as Jonathan Margolis shows each week in his "Random" column for this magazine - and even the phones' potential for exposing wrongdoing. "Sooner or later there will be a videophone equivalent of Rodney King (whose brutal beating by Los Angeles police in 1991, captured on video, led to charges being brought against four officers)."
Sam Gedeon, for one, is grateful for the technology's ability to support law and order. One evening last April, Gedeon, 45, was at his grocery shop in Gothenburg, Sweden, when a youth walked in threatening violence if he did not hand over 100 kronor (£7.80). Thinking quickly, Gedeon remembered his Nokia 7650, which he had left in an upstairs office. After telling the robber that he had to go upstairs to fetch the cash, Gedeon returned with the phone and photographed him as he banged on the counter. Gedeon then used his computer to print out the image for the local police.
Within half an hour, the suspect had been found in a nearby restaurant. In July, a 15-year-old was convicted of attempted robbery and sentenced to youth detention. The prosecutor, Peeter Aaw, said it was the first time a camphone image had been used as evidence in court.
Camphones have also led to arrests in a foiled child abduction in New Jersey, a Japanese hit-and-run and a recent burglary in Manchester. Chief Superintendent Ian Alexander, a divisional commander with Tayside Police, is convinced that the phones will become a vital weapon in the war against crime. So far, the Tayside force has used the phones mainly to catch graffiti taggers and record non-standard car number-plates, but Alexander sees huge possibilities for increasing covert surveillance of suspects. In five months, he says, the phones have led to 40 arrests. "These phones are very powerful tools," he says. "They're already increasing detection rates significantly - our vandalism detection rate is up 18 per cent this year. The technology is a key part of speeding things up."
When officers see a fresh graffiti tag on a street wall, they send an image in real time by phone to the crime management desk. Intelligence officers then search for a match on the internal database. "We also go into schools, and record logos that we find on school blotters," says Alexander. "So we'll know that this tag was done by Jimmy Smith in 4B." The technique may seem intrusive - a child, certainly, would not expect their schoolbook scribbles to find their way on to a police database - but the force insists it is preventing hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of damage.
But as quickly as the police are discovering new uses for the phones, criminals are also adapting the technology. Last April, the National Criminal Intelligence Service reported that paedophiles in central Scotland had been caught swapping indecent images over the phone networks. On Alexander's own Tayside beat, drug-dealers are using them to exchange written messages about the next deal, rather than risk phone conversations. "They think their picture messages are safe from interception, unlike voice calls," he says. "If they want to think that, it's fine with us."
As for personal privacy, the spread of camphone use - among those on both sides of the law - is fast rewriting the rules. Some US states have now introduced a new offence of "video voyeurism" to penalise those who distribute salacious images of strangers without their knowledge; Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice has banned the phones entirely, and South Korea has legislated to ensure that the phones click loudly when an image is captured. In Britain, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 has established a new crime of "voyeurism", with up to two years in jail for anyone caught "operating equipment" that records other people's private activities for sexual gratification. But it will take clarification to determine exactly what a "private act", under the new legislation, will mean in practice - and whether MobileAsses.com will find its British contributors risking jail.
Howard Rheingold thinks there is no longer any point even in talking about visual privacy. "There are 25 million closed-circuit television cameras bolted to buildings, and I have seen prototypes of inexpensive wireless video webcams the size of an aspirin," he says. "Between camphones, security cams, and your neighbour's or spouse's desire to spy on you, I expect that our current ideas of visual privacy are doomed."
(The Times Magazine, December 13 2003)
<< Home