<<< Camera phones have also led to the creation of a new form of mobile blogging, or moblogging for short. Sites such as textamerica.com, for instance allow image sharing, and mainstream blogs, too, often feature reader-submitted photos taken with camera phones. Celebrity sightings are especially well documented.

“Photographers – particularly professional photographers -- have a very evolved set of ethics as to when they’re photographing people, and they respect, basically through their trade, certain levels of privacy,” said Wu, an amateur photographer. “Now everybody’s a photographer all the time with unlimited film and the result is to increase the amount of life that is recorded.”

“There’s a point at which is starts to interfere with people’s sense of freedom and what kind of place we live and ultimately what the state of our autonomy is,” he said. 

Michael Zimmer, a doctoral candidate at New York University whose research interests include privacy and information technology, noted that the ability to curb unexpected consequences of technology such as threats to privacy is dependent on consumer awareness. 

Camera phones can have positive uses. For instance, in recent years women have used the phones to capture images of men exposing themselves on the subway. Such images are then posted on the Internet, and, in some cases, the offender is identified. Closely related, a blog, hollabacknyc.com, encourages photos of street harassers.

Camera phones potentially represent an evolution in the way people record memories, said Zimmer, who often uses his to record the labels on wine bottles for future reference.

Yet, aside from the every day, the phones can also help people record and remember more momentous events. Camera phones allowed images of the London bombing to surface immediately, Zimmer said. Furthermore, the public was banned from recording images as the body of Pope John Paul II lay in state at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, but people paying final respects used discreet camera phones nonetheless.

“There always have been people who walk around with cameras all the time and take pictures and we thought they were photographers and that was their hobby,” said Zimmer. “Now it’s moved from being personal hobbies to just the way that people interact with their world.”