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Your arse is on the web.
The digital camera is convenient and discrete. And increasingly it is being used to make adult stars out of ordinary people....
 The growth of digital cameras has fuelled a new obsession. Across the city are people armed with discrete cameras or camphones photographing you. They're not doing it for quality websites such as this, or for their own collection of tourist snapshots. They are doing it to fuel their own desires, and serve a growing market for voyeuristic images.
In the past few years there has been an explosion in websites dedicated to people - women generally - being photographed on the streets. The themes vary, from bottoms to cleavage, jeans to boots, but the aim is to the same - to capture attractive people on camera without them realising it.
For a few the thrill of the hunt is what matters. Chasing a pretty girl through a crowd or hanging around at the corner of a street is where the thrill lies. In the worst cases the devious aspects of finding new ways of getting a camera in to a changing room or a shot up a girl's skirt is the thrill. Whatever the focus, the hunt gives them a chance to pit their wits against that of their prey, while the subscribers who visit these sites can enjoy the results of that hunt from the safety of their own home.
Others find themselves inadvertent contributors to the craze. Trawling through YouTube, a service that allows subscribers to share videos, produced countless shots of people in compromising positions. Clearly taken on drunken nights out, as dares or jokes between friends, these videos show people performing acts they wouldn't normally do. But the videos are posted, shared, downloaded and viewed by an audience hungry for gratification.
Fortunately, even if you are captured on camera, it is unlikely that you will get to hear about it. But perhaps, one day, you might be trawling the internet and find a pair of legs that look familiar, or a clip of you walking down the street. Until then, ignorance is certainly bliss.
However, the camphone can be put to more sinister uses. Digital imaging is being used to feed office crushes, turning perhaps innocent attraction that might have faded in to infatuation and harassment. Photographs taken of colleagues are turning up on bulletin boards to be discussed. Text messages are being received from strangers with comments about dress, body shape, skin colour. Alternatively the same techniques can be applied to harassing individuals with the explicit intention of causing distress.
This form of harassment can be upsetting, perhaps more so than any other because it becomes easy to spread across the internet. Already there are cases both in the US and UK of victims suffering nervous breakdowns and other psychological problems because of being stalked or harassed by camera users.
While there are theoretical steps you can take to tackle the culprits, in reality your chances of success are fairly limited. Once your image is out on the Internet you are unlikely to ever be able to remove all copies of it. Someone - somewhere - will keep a copy in their private collection.
If you do decide to try and limit the damage you can contact the sites where you know the image or video is. The professional sharing sites such as Yahoo! Groups, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube all operate policies which prohibit the sharing of illegal material, so you should be able to get it removed along with any discussion or comment quite quickly.
Sites which sell subscriptions may prove more problematic. Many will hide behind the argument that the photographer is the copyright holder, you were in a public place and therefore bad luck. In the UK this is not the case. The photographer does hold the copyright and has a right to take a picture of you for their own "personal" purposes. However, when those images are shared for the purposes of sexual gratification you become a victim of a crime. Agreements across the EU now make it easier to get such sites shut down - but once they're down they have a habit of springing back up in other forms.
You also have to be firm with authorities and employers. The police are aware of this form of harassment, but you need to ensure they take your case seriously. In all likelihood unless you are harmed, or there is a pattern of behaviour from the "photographer" giving cause for concern it is unlikely anything will happen, but it is worth making the point and arguing for a crime reference number (particularly if you're minded to get an ISP to shut a site).
Employers are becoming aware of digital camera abuse, but many still view it as a bit of harmless fun. If you do make a complaint focus on the harassment rather than trying to make a deal out of the use of a camera phone.
Prevention is better than cure, but there isn't a lot that can be done to protect yourself. Put simply, if someone finds you presses their buttons they'll photograph you. As long as you stay aware of what's going on around you, don't agree to be filmed as a dare and deal promptly with anything that does arise you'll feel better. But don't take it to an extreme - don't get wound up because, frankly, these things happen.
When you walk down the street there will be people checking you out and finding themselves attracted to you. What the digital camera and the camphone has done is made it easier for those with particular fetishes or needs to fuel them. Don't let it wind you up, don't let it get to you.
Thanks to the Home Office for information on the legal aspects of digital voyeurism.
 Ross Hall is The Smoke's webmaster and editor. In real life he's a Compliance Officer and sometimes photographer.
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Published on Saturday, 15 November 2008
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