Rep. Peter King [R, NY-3] has a new bill titled ‘Camera Phone Predator Alert Act‘. The bill proposes mobile phones to make a click sound when a photograph is taken.
It is hard to imagine how click sound is a viable solution in the first place. It is super easy to muffle the click sound. Cameras come with zoom and the regular click sound doesn’t reach as far as the zoom lens. I bet the bill will have additional clauses requiring zoom cameras to have 100W speakers in the future. My personal favorite hack is a super spy periscope lens: http://www.gizmag.com/super-secret-spy-lens-for-your-slr/10575/
Other problems include retrofitting existing phones with click sound. It is also presumptuous to assume that voyeur photography is the only purpose of a mobile phone camera. I can only imagine click sound chorus at a stage performance or a crowded public place.
What could be a potential solution is citizen surveillance as illustrated here: http://dudeswhotakephotosofboobs.com/. The website features of photographs of people voyeur-photographing somebody else. It puts them in the hall of shame thus discouraging acts of voyeursism. Its not without flaws though, it is possible for an innocent photographer to have his picture featured on the website because of personal conflicts.
This has been the law in Japan for several years. There is a thriving black market in hacking phones to turn off the shutter sound.
I think it’s a bit crazy, considering how small actual cameras are now, and how they don’t “click” anymore. It would be better to sneak a higher resolution camera in somewhere anyway. Most phones don’t make the noise, or can be muffled, or the volume will affect the click noise etc, and retrofitting all old phones is impossible due to the sheer amount of phones around. It still relies on someone hearing the noise! “Um, did you just take photo?” “No.” I don’t see how this solves it anyway, you can’t prove if they did take a photo, or what they took a photo of.
Also, there is no proof that those guys are taking voyeuristic photos anyway (awesome if it did really catch them out though).
In my experience cctv security is a tricky business
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