Click-free clique

If you think cell phone users are rude, just wait until camera phones are on everyone's hip or in everyone's purse. But just who will be most obnoxious: the people pointing their phone at you — or at someone too close to you for comfort — or the people who create technical safety zones around themselves so that when you happen to be in their vicinity assessing the photo opportunity of a lifetime, your camera phone doesn't work?

Companies such as Sensaura and Iceberg Systems in the U.K. are developing a camera-blocking technology called Safe Haven that companies can use through their Wi-Fi or Bluetooth technologies.

Granted, for some companies blocking technology will be an important tool for protecting against corporate espionage. For others, especially those who get real busy in January and February before the New Year's resolutions to get in shape fail, it's a matter of privacy.

That's all well and good, but blocking technology will not be a friend to the average citizen. It will result in the one-upmanship that caller ID has become. Someone will develop a blocking device that extends a given distance, and then the phone manufacturers will develop a better zoom. Someone will file suit because their picture was taken inadvertently, and someone else will sue because they couldn't take a picture of a tree in a park because it was too close to the blocking device in the public john.

Eventually, blocking will become a tool the powerful use against the powerless. Shouldn't it be the other way around? And barring that, shouldn't the playing field at least be level?

I say we subscribe to what LightSurf CEO Philippe Kahn calls “The Sunshine Law” and what writer David Brin calls “The Transparent Society”: Let the lights and cameras shine in all directions.