Always in the camera's eye Updated 6/26/2006 11:55 PM ET By Janet Kornblum, USA TODAY
Traffic cameras zoom in enough to capture your dangling cigarette. Crime cameras "see" in the dark. Satellite images show whether your car is in the driveway. Most Americans realize ubiquitous monitoring is the price of living in a high-tech world. These days, surveillance cameras aren't just mounted on buildings and satellites, controlled by government and businesses. Now they're carried by a nation obsessed with its own image. Kids snap cellphone pictures at parties and instantly put them on the Web; fans who nab photos of unsuspecting celebrities share them on celebrity-watch sites. The guy in the car next to you is leaning out of his window, taking a video that he later uploads to a video site where it could be seen by dozens or hundreds of people — maybe even millions. "Our computers are about to become unblinking paparazzi," says Paul Saffo of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "And we're all going to feel a little bit like Brad and Angelina." SAY CHEESE: What do you think about the trend in omnipresent digital cameras? Thanks to the availability of cheap digital cameras and websites that simplify photo-sharing, Americans have a new favorite pastime: creating their own reality shows, featuring themselves — and anyone else they see along the way. While many, especially young people, think it's all fun, privacy watchers are eyeing the new trend, trying to gauge just how it will affect us legally and shape us socially. "We're going to be a society where tons and tons of photographs and information about us are available online without our consent," says Jason Schultz, staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy and civil liberties advocacy group that focuses on computers and digital technology. "Privacy is sometimes something we don't realize we value except in hindsight." It's not that most citizen videographers are looking to violate anyone's privacy. Instead, many of today's burgeoning filmmakers are tomorrow's Hollywood hopefuls just looking for their lucky break. And many bystanders will do anything they can to be in pictures. "I usually have my camera on me," says Steven Downie, 22, a manufacturing technician from Woburn, Mass., whose home-brewed videos have drawn some attention on YouTube, a rapidly growing website where people post and watch a huge array of homemade and professional videos. "If you go to a party or convention, you'd be surprised how many people wave, (flash) a peace sign, stick out their tongue or just yell 'Hey.' "Cameras are fun. It's like the new thing to do," he says. "TV shows are boring. Cameras are the way to go. It's fresh." When Downie is at a party, he says there "are just flashes left and right. I'll run over and do stupid things to get on camera. I do love the camera a lot. I will admit it. "Obviously, everybody wants to be famous." Well, maybe not everybody. While most people mug for the camera when he takes pictures at work, for instance, some of the older workers "put their hands in front of it and yell, 'Get out of my face.' " Some parents of teens also can't fathom why teens pose provocatively or flaunt illegal behavior, such as downing a beer when they're under 21, in photos online. "The gesture of putting up these pictures is the gesture of 'Know me,' " says Parry Aftab, an expert on teen safety and the Internet. " 'Understand me. Let me express my identity to you.' This is the job of adolescence." The wilder — and more seductive — the picture, the more likely a teen is to draw attention and make new online "friends." (Friends are made when one person invites another to be a friend on a personal profile. Sometimes they know each other well. Sometimes they're passing acquaintances.) The more links to friends someone has on sites such as MySpace and Facebook, the higher their status. Most kids are posting for each other, but quickly are learning that the world also is watching. Internet expert Nancy Willard has been warning parents about the possibly incriminating pictures their kids' friends may post online after graduation parties. "Kids go to these parties, and everybody's going to have a camera," she says. "And when they finally wake up (the day after the party), they'll post all these really fun pictures on the Internet and maybe post names to go along with the pictures. Nobody has any ability to control what's going to happen with those images. And they can be damaging." But being able to post photos also can empower young people, says Ginger Thomson, CEO of YouthNoise, a site aimed at helping young people use the Web to promote social causes. It gives young people "a sense of 'I'm someone' in a world of tremendous complexity and enormous population," Thomson says. Experts are resigned to the reality that our photos increasingly are everywhere. Our images are not only stored in government databases (taken from places such as traffic cameras and satellite images), but they also are stored on the computers of our friends, our neighbors and family and in the databanks of Internet companies that host photo sites. Right now, those images are relatively benign because technology doesn't yet allow us to search through images, Saffo says. Photo searches online are based on the words used to describe those photos and not on the photos themselves. "So far they haven't really destroyed our privacy because it's too much trouble for humans to look through and find the things they want to find," Saffo says. But face recognition software has been improving rapidly. And the point at which it is good enough for people to use computers to quickly scan images, "things are really going to change a lot," Saffo says. "Automating the watcher is going to sweep away the last vestiges of privacy. It's starting to happen now. "Americans are touchingly naive about these things." Privacy advocate Schultz sees a legal solution: passing laws that will keep the government from using our pictures against us. "As more people take private photos and make them available online or save them, the temptation for the government or other powerful entities to want to subpoena or take those photos and plow through them will increase," he says. "The government will think 'Oh, someone else has already collected all this data. I'll just take theirs instead of doing my own internal criminal investigation.' That's a danger." But cameras offer "upsides as well." They can allow ordinary citizens to keep would-be assailants and authority figures from overstepping their bounds, Schultz says. Political protesters regularly photograph police at rallies, for example. In a now well-known story, a woman identified a man who had exposed himself to her in New York's subways by snapping his photo with her cellphone camera. A San Francisco photographer regularly posts pictures of security guards who try to stop him from taking photos in public places. Aside from the legal issues, however, social scientists worry about the way the ever-present lens already is affecting society. Just the knowledge that cameras are everywhere can "have a chilling effect," says psychologist and sociologist Sherry Turkle of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It can give people "a sense of living your life on camera and living your life potentially being watched." That changes behavior, adds Howard Rheingold, an author and consultant on online communities. "It forms an environment in which the assumption that there's a camera around is more and more part of your daily awareness. This assumption you're being watched internalizes surveillance." The result: super-self-consciousness. "Nobody's ever going to scratch their nose in public again," Saffo says, only half joking. "In the past, privacy meant a right to be invisible. But I think it's fallen to the lower standard of the right to be left alone. You're going to accommodate yourself to the fact that you're constantly being watched. All you're going to say is just 'Don't bother me. Don't hassle me.' " Unless, of course, you want to be in pictures. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TELECOM-CITIES Current searchable archives (Feb. 1, 2006 to present) at http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@forums.nyu.edu/ Old searchble archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/telecom-cities@googlegroups.com/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---