The Future Of Mobile Messaging: Multimedia Cellphones and Their Privacy Implications
by Russell Shaw
I believe we are reaching a point in which the privacy-violating implications of mobile messaging are reaching a flashpoint.
I explored an aspect of this in a ZDNet blog posting I made yesterday. Seems as though we’re seeing the start of a trend in which students take camera-enabled cell phones (aren’t they all?) to school, take unflattering photos and videos of their teachers, attach these photos to SMS and MMS messages, and then post them on sites such as MySpace and YouTube.
These actions hit home for me. The girlfriend just recently taught photography to some vivacious middle schoolers. She’s described giddy kids taking pictures of their friends, their non-friends, and yes, even their teachers. And although these images were captured via camera, and not via camera phones, these kids all have cell phones anyway.
What’s to prevent their new-found enthusiasm and expertise from being applied to photos taken with their cell and then spread to each other as well as posted on the Internet?
And I need to tell you, we’re not just looking at kids, here.
While my mobile does not have video capture and MMS capability, It’s just a couple of clicks from my camera phone to a posting on my Facebook or Flickr photostream. If I were spurious or mean-spirited, I see funky stuff every day that I could photograph and either SMS or post. A homeless person pushing a shopping cart. A guy picking his nose. Even just something as innocent as a traffic jam- with license plate numbers revealed.
I guess my point is that while camera-enabled and video-enabled cell phones substantially enable us to obtain a more varied and ubiquitous view of our world, let us not just gratuitously use these tools just because we can.
