A Consuming Experience

Just thought this Times article "Snap... privacy and 33.5m camera phones" from a couple of weeks ago was worth pointing out, for those concerned about privacy and how easy it is for people, especially with cameraphones, to take pictures or videos of you and share it with the world on the Net.

Not that the press would be willing to pay for photos or videos of me, anyway... but as I blog anonymously, I do want to keep pics of my face off the Net if identified with "Improbulus".

The article, by Christina Michalos, a London barrister who wrote The Law of Photography & Digital Images, says that "Broadly speaking, if a person takes a photograph of you in a public place there is no legal basis to prevent either the taking of the photograph or the publication of it. But this general principle is subject to some exceptions which are largely dependant upon what the subject of the photograph is doing or whether there is harassment by repeated photography".

It offers a few suggestions e.g. the Press Complaints Commission for people to try who want to protect their privacy, but data protection law doesn't seem to help here and basically it says that (in the UK at least) "as things stand, the citizen in the public street is fair game for the mobile phone photographer."

I guess we have been warned!

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