Cameraphones and worries over possible misuse

P.C. Naommy, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

The growing popularity of cameraphones is raising concern over possible misuse of the devices and whether the government should regulate their use.

"The market response to cameraphones has been so high," marketing manager at PT Motorola Indonesia Yanty Agus told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

Yanty said that the main aim of a new facility such as cameraphones was to keep consumers abreast of new technology. "If people start to use such devices wrongly, then we have no direct power to stop it," she said.

She added that Motorola produced low-end cameraphones at prices below Rp 1.5 million (US$176.5).

According to research carried out by Sylvia Ngonde, a researcher at the Faculty of Psychology of the Widya Mandala Catholic University in Surabaya, with a maximum capacity of 50 kilobytes, anyone can send text, pictures, even sounds through a cell phone all at once, unlimited by space and time.

The cheap, real-time information exchange facility has made the technology very popular, especially with youngsters.

The research showed that 25 percent of teenagers had exchanged pornographic images via Multimedia Message Services (MMSs).

Concern over the misuse of cameraphones has spread to the industrial world. Some companies in Asia, such as Samsung Electronic in Korea, have restricted the use of cameraphones at key factories and research centers amid worries of industrial espionage.

Roy Suryo, a media and telecommunications expert, said that a common misuse of cameraphones here was the illegal publication of pictures of someone, taken without their permission, on the Internet or on other mobile phones.

"We cannot blame the technology as it has been created to help people, to make it easier for us to do our jobs," said Roy, adding that the only way to curb the misuse of such devices was through legislation.

According to Roy, the Ministry of Communications and Information proposes to issue a bill on information and electronic transactions. The draft, which was completed on July 5 last year, has not yet been forwarded to the House of Representatives for deliberation, and still lies on a desk in the State Secretariat.

Although there were no details, Roy said that clauses in the draft ban people from sending or publishing improper files, such as pornography or illegal pictures taken without permission, via telecommunications media, such as the Internet or cell phones.

According to market research firm Strategy Analytics, as quoted by AFP, about 65 million cameraphones were sold worldwide in 2003. The firm also noted that the sale of cameraphones has outpaced that of digital cameras, with about five million of the former sold in the United States.