Cameraphones and worries over possible misuse
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.