“Analysts have predicted that there will be almost 1 billion camera phones in use within five years, which has led companies such as Samsung and LG Electronics to bar employees from using camera phones in research and manufacturing facilities because of fears over the security of sensitive data.”
For the last twenty years, there has been a huge increase in video surveillance, as the required hardware became cheap. Surveillance that has been heavily resisted in the US is commonplace in Europe.
The ubiquity of camera phones changes the surveillance equation around.
So now everyone gets paranoid – but they shouldn’t. If everyone carries camera phones, then perhap you decentralize and democratize ‘surveillance’. The risk is that you replace a fear of big brother with vigilante paranoia that police neighborhood watch schemes can produce.
This all may sound far fetched, but clearly 1 billion people carrying around a camera and the ability to wire images from it to a picture desk anywhere in the world, at all times, may have some macro effects.