…se complica con los nuevos teléfonos:
If you’re male and your mobile hasn’t got an in-built camera you might not get a date with Mariko, or thousands of girls like her. Then again it might be in your favour. Mariko, you have to understand, is a young Tokyo girl who’s part prostitute, part racketeer, and she likes to check out the faces of her «dates» by mobile before she goes on a job. «If we can check a guy’s face over our cell phones, we know the sort of trustworthy guys that we can hang out with for a while,» Mariko told Japan’s Weekly Playboy magazine recently.
En un artículo, Better than Text? se cuentan ésa y otras posibilidades de los teléfonos con cámara. Algunas son muy serias:
As well as being fun, the picture phones are finding serious applications. Famously well-ordered, Japan has less reported crime than the West, but street crime is rising and investigators are happy to enrol any new help ? which is where the camphone, now carried by more than seven million people in Japan, has found a role. Police chiefs in Osaka, the country’s second biggest city, recently agreed that citizens could wirelessly e-mail them pictures of suspects if they come across a crime.
The social implications of this could be enormous. Not everyone carries a camera, but the majority now carry a phone, and they are much more discreet. When camphones become the norm some sociologists believe that all public activity will come before the recording lens. For Britons who already feel over-scrutinised by surveillance cameras, any claim to privacy will vanish in a flash of clicking mobiles. Japanese individuals can already act as Little Brother, as some multimedia services can now send movie clips by mobile, too.
En el caso de Europa, ¿correrán los teléfonos con cámara la misma suerte que los teléfonos WAP o nos pondrán a un paso más cerca de la sociedad transparente de David Brin?:
For in fact, it is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.
Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.
The real issue facing citizens of a new century will be how mature adults choose to live — how they might compete, cooperate and thrive ? in such a world. A transparent society.
Viendo las alternativas tal y como las pinta David Brin, quizá nos convenga comprarnos un teléfono de esos en cuanto podamos.
(vía Smart Mobs)
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