Excerpt of NY Times article for my B&C blog:
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In recent weeks the devices have been banned from some federal buildings, Hollywood movie screenings, health club locker rooms and corporate offices. But the more potent threat posed by the phonecams, privacy experts say, may not be in the settings where people are already protective of their privacy but in those where they have never thought to care.

"Even simple things like your daily grooming habits around your nose and mouth can be embarrassing if captured by someone else," said James Katz, a professor of communication at Rutgers who says he has witnessed people being physically threatened for using their phone cameras. "We're moving into an era where there will be almost nothing that's not captured by somebody's camera, and that has dramatic implications for how people choose to live their lives in public."

Legally, the new generation of shutterbugs is probably safe for now. In a public place, the expectation of privacy, which American courts must weigh in evaluating whether a violation has occurred, is assumed to be negligible. News cameras can photograph people in public without their permission, and we have become accustomed to security cameras watching us in elevators, cabs and A.T.M.'s.But ethically, the new surveillance tools seem to puncture a long-held assumption that it is possible -- and often desirable -- to lose oneself in the crowd. And in an image-conscious culture, hidden cameras in the hands of fellow citizens with instant access to a global audience may provoke more outrage than government or corporate surveillance cameras whose images are not shared with the world. ... Camera phones have begun to outsell digital cameras. ...

The object of street photography, whose legacy dates to the invention of the Kodak camera in the 1890's, has always been to capture life as it is lived, and photographers have eagerly adopted technology that would allow them to record it more faithfully. In the mid-1930's, Helen Levitt famously attached a right-angle viewfinder to her 35-millimeter Leica so she could photograph children in New York City neighborhoods without pointing the camera at them directly. But even the most miniature digital cameras require holding the camera up to the eye, signaling that a photograph is being taken. It is the stealth capability of camera phones, combined with their ability to broadcast the image instantly, that some legal experts say may eventually call for a rethinking of privacy laws. ...

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