January 2nd, 2007
Saddam Hussein: You're on candid camera
While the U.S. was chasing after Saddam Hussein's phantom weapons of mass destruction, the camera-enabled cell phone was beginning its journey from novelty to omnipresent recorder of history, with the Internet as its near instantaneous transport mechanism. It's no surprise that despite efforts to eliminate camera phones from the execution, video of of Saddam Hussein's hanging soon appeared on the Internet. This latest act of barbarism unleashed on the Web in grainy cell phone video also received international criticism from various parties.
In the next few years billions of people will have phones with high resolution still and video cameras, GPS, geotagging, Bluetooth and plenty of network bandwidth and storage to document any point in time. That's in addition to millions of surveillance cameras covering the planet and the proliferation of cheap, tiny, wireless, wearable "spy" cameras.
Transparency takes on a new meaning, and you would have to be invisible or off the grid to gain any modicum of privacy. Get used to it. Along with citizen journalism we have the surveillance society. Like other technological innovations, there are positive and negative consequences, and we haven't sorted through all of the ethical and legal implications or permutations, such as different approaches and legalisms country by country. In any case, be aware: You're on candid camera.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
