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Apple Patents Tech to Stop iPhones Filming in Venues
An anonymous reader writes "A patent application filed by Apple, and obtained by the Times, reveals how the software would work. If a person were to hold up their iPhone, the device would trigger the attention of infra-red sensors installed at the venue. These sensors would then instruct the iPhone to disable its camera."
No reason, except that the fact that you bought an iPhone, is itself a statement that you desire electronics which serve other parties' interests in preference to your own.
The reminds me of peoples' complaints about Windows. A Windows 3.0 user probably deserves to be cut some slack when he bitches about it. Maybe an iPhone 1.0 user does too. But surely at some point, when certain properties of the platform are well-known (and arguable indirectly even parts of its marketing), people who buy it are implicitly consenting to -- nay, even choosing -- those properties.
iPhones consider the users' desires to be of secondary importance to certain other things. You know this before you buy one. You know that you are not allowed to run certain types of applications if Apple or Apple's partners feel is it contrary to their interests for you to do that.
If that sounds bad, one way people look at it (which I think is horrible but I sort of see the point of view), is that your impulsive desires may conflict with your rational interests. (If Apple were to allow you to make a VoIP call over a certain cell network whose contracts with users prohibit that, that would eventually get the users in trouble with that provider, or otherwise result in the provider increasing their rates. If Apple were to allow you to use your camera in theaters, the theater might call the cops on you.) By denying you the capability to offend other parties, they're keeping you out of conflict.
(You must remember that we have always been at war with Eurasia. If you sometimes mistakenly feel an impulse to claim otherwise, isn't it in the interests of truth and accuracy that your mistake be censored, until you have time to catch it yourself? It's really for your own good that you have someone helping you do what you really want.)
But whether this way of looking at it makes sense or not (I think it's disgusting), you know that the device is hostile to your desires (if not hostile to your ultimate interests of getting along with others). If you buy it anyway, then you're actively taking a postition in favor of that behavior. Claiming ignorance of this property of iPhones, is like claiming ignorance of Windows' friendliness to malware.
If someone says they don't know that iPhones have this sort of relationship with their users, I find that far-fetched, but I guess I can't contradict what someone else claims to have in their head. But let's get serious: how many more years of this, before it is reasonable to expect people to be aware, and call them careless and negligent (rather than innocent victims) if they continue to maintain they don't know? We eventually need to draw a line.
They will not be preventing the general public from recording them; they will be preventing Apple customers from recording them, thereby keeping cops from feeling like they have to go over to the Apple customer and beat them too and stomp on their phone. This means that if you buy Apple products, you will have a more harmonious relationship with authorities. (I don't know whether to put a smiley after that last sentence or not, as I'm being both sarcastic and sincere at the same time.)
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