I’ve heard of privacy complaints before regarding camera phones, but digital shoplifting?

In Japan, improved picture quality has prompted bookshop browsers to use their camera phones to quietly snap a photo of, say, an interesting recipe out of a cooking magazine. Such maneuvers already have a name: “digital shoplifting.” Japanese magazine publishers have grown concerned enough about the potential for lost sales that in July and August the industry association mailed out posters to 33,000 bookstores nationwide, urging customers to “please refrain from recording information inside the store with your camera phone.”

I’ve said before that I think camera phones are a problem, but they may be an inevitable one. What happens when we all have wearable computers, or worse yet, embedded computers in our brain? How will you stop such theft then? And how will you stop locker-room “memories” from being transferred around the Internet? While a part of me thinks that camera phones represent a serious intrusion of our privacy, another part of me thinks that there’s nothing we can do about it, and that we all ought to just get used to the idea that everywhere we go, everything we say and do, will be recorded, no matter how private, and will be available for scrutiny on the Internet, perhaps even in our lifetimes.

Read the story here. (subscr. req)

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