The Kodak Brownie changed privacy rights

Marshall McLuhan remarked that photography turned the entire world into a brothel:

* http://www.sfu.ca/media-lab/426/readings/thephoto.htm

Also:

> The camera tends to turn people into things, and the photograph extends and multiplies the human image to the proportions of mass-produced merchandise. The movie stars and matinee idols are put into the public domain by photography. They become dreams that money can buy. They can be bought and thumbed more easily than public prostitutes.

More:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Media

"You should be flattered."

Ugh.

Also: "We can because there's no law against it." Really icky attitude. No concern for ethics or how it impacts other people. Wow.

My first camera was a Kodak Box Brownie that took 620 size film which I got at the age of about 10 or 11. Whilst I was glad to have a camera of sorts I never liked it much as it was never very sharp - even small contact prints looked soft. Its main advantage was for me to learn how to do my own film developing and printing which I enjoyed doing (even though at one stage I accidentally nearly killed myself when using HCN in the confined space of a darkroom).

This interest in photography led me down the path professionally into electronic imaging - vidicons, image orthicons etc. and eventually into electronic surveillance work.

If the Box Brownie could ever be considered a threat to privacy then it'd be hard even to put it on a graph or scale when compared with the privacy-invading cameras of today.

However, as they say in the chassics, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Over 20 years ago I was predicting autonomous self-propelled insect-size cameras no bigger than a cockroach. Now only in recent days I read of researchers having produced a flying 'insect' no bigger than a honey bee.

I've thought about this a great amount in recent years and I cannot see any practical way of protecting our privacy in future. Soon we will have not only perfected these crawling/flying insect-like autonomous robots but we'll be equipping them with cameras equipped with lenses made from metamaterials that will provide unprecedented resolution not only in the visible spectrum but also in the IR and UV - not to mention them being equipped with numerous other types of data-gathering sensors.

Frankly, the concept horrifies somewhat. Not only will personal privacy be under assault in ways never dreamt of before but also securing state secrets, etc will be nigh on impossible without a complete rethink. (Just think, a company's source code, circuits, boardroom discussions etc will be very easy game for competitors.)

We've already left Orwell's world behind technically and we've seen privacy vanish as the consequence - with the likes of Google, Facebook, governments - NSA, GCHQ, cameras all over our cities watching everything we do, and so on.

You don't have to be Einstein to realize that in just a few decades that current camera/sensor/robot technology will be several orders of magnitude better than it is today and the surveillance flexibility it'll provide the spyer with will be completely unprecedented - just unimaginable by today's standards.

Personally, I don't think I've the fortitude and wherewithal to cope adequately in a dystopian world like that. I doubt if many others do either.

I am really suprised that the cost of a Brownie camera is $1.25 (roughly $34 in today’s dollars), when contrast to todays ubiquitous equivalent which is the phone camera. Equivalent in the sense of enabling folks to take photos ad nauseum.