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.



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