Last week, the tech world was rocked by reports that Apple was patenting tech nology that would allow outsiders to remotely shut off the camera in an iPhone. The scenario involved people attending concerts and recording video to share with their friends, something that big record companies frown on. Under the patent, a remote signal from a transmitter in the concert hall would tell your iPhone camera to shut down until the concert was over.
Apple defenders were quick to point out that Apple makes a lot of patent filings, most of which never go anywhere (although others, somewhat contradictorily, said that Apple has to keep big record companies happy now that they’re iTunes partners).
But the issue raises questions more serious than whether Apple should be crippling its devices to protect the profits of big media companies. Because if record companies can shut down your iPhone’s camera, so can other, even less savory, operators.
In the last few years, smartphones have brought about a revolution in news. From the revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Syria to reports of police misconduct in Miami Beach, smartphone-equipped bystanders have captured images and video that the authorities would’ve preferred to keep under wraps.
Authorities have tried confiscating smartphones, but often the footage has already been e-mailed out — it takes just a minute — and new smartphone apps even stream photos and video directly to remote Web sites as they’re taken, so confiscating the phone just gets you captured on video acting like a thug.
In places like Syria and Iran, the authorities have reacted by trying to shut down the Internet, but doing that is pretty much an admission that you’ve got something to hide.
In America, law enforcement sometimes tries to charge citizen journalists with “wiretapping” for recording police officers’ behavior in public places — a bogus approach but one that can intimidate people who don’t want to have to go to court. (There’s talk in Congress of adopting photographer’s-rights legislation to punish such misbehavior.)
But a technology that would shut down camera phones remotely would let the authorities off the hook, because the pictures in question would simply never get taken. It’s insidious — and amazingly Big Brotherish for a company that made its big splash with a famous “1984”-based commercial. Now Apple’s technology looks to enable just that kind of world.
It also raises a question of ownership. When Americans buy an iPhone or other gadget, we tend to think that, since we paid for it, we actually, you know, own it. But the attitude of phone and media companies is somewhat different.
Cellphones are often “locked” to a particular carrier’s network, and now smartphone companies — with Apple a particular offender — are already starting to regulate what apps are available for their phones with of an eye more toward what’s useful for the companies’ interests than toward what serves the user.
A phone that’s designed to be remotely disabled is a phone that doesn’t really belong to its user, but to its manufacturer and the manufacturer’s “partners” in media and government.
When you have a tool that’s controlled by someone else, that’s not ownership. What it is, in my opinion, is un-American.
My message to Apple and others of its ilk: Give the power to the users. That’s what the 21st century is supposed to be about.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Ten nessee, hosts InstaVision on PJTV.com.