> while unnecessarily degrading user experience across society?
Does a shutter sound really degrades the experience unless you were indeed trying to take a stealth photo?
Does a shutter sound really degrades the experience unless you were indeed trying to take a stealth photo?
A common example that I can give is when you want to take a photo of a document for future reference (or maybe even PDF submission) in a quiet office or room. I can definitely say that the mandatory shutter sounds create a lot of awkward moments.
When I was using my carrying my laptop around public places in town most of the day, before I'd close the laptop lid (which triggered an immediate suspend at some low level), I'd press a hotkey to "secure" the laptop. This locked the screen and started a process to zero various RAM caches, and scrub misc. temp/junk files. (Not that I needed that, but I was figuring out privacy&security at the time.) To indicate to me that it was OK to close the lid and leave, instead of doing a beep that might bother someone in a library or something, I flashed an LED for an instant. The LED available was the white ThinkLight at the top of the LCD, which was bright enough to illuminate the keyboard and nearby workspace.
You might guess how this could appear in a library. Sudden flash, as if from a cameraphone, in someone's peripheral vision, coming from the direction of a guy who is suddenly leaving.
So I disabled that indicator, because it seemed infinitely more risky and harmful than the threat of a spy neutralizing me and using advanced computer forensics on my laptop to recover a fragment of a high-value spam email.
And if you really need to record the document for other reasons (like whistleblowing), you can record a video...
Think of for example quiet libraries with a bunch of students quietly studying. They do not like other people making noise, however legitimate the reason is.
> you can record a video...
Video recording also has a mandated start/stop sound, FWIW.
With film photography people were be restrained with the cost of film and photo development, whereas now there's no restraint and lots of people take lots of photos of the most mundane things. I can imagine the noise and distractions of 'click, click, click' in public spaces, events, gatherings etc. An always on chorus of 'click, click, click,click, click, click,click, click, click'.
More fundamentally, it's just not a tool's proper place to second-guess if its wielder is doing something illegitimate. You should be technically able to use your general computing device to launch a doomsday weapon if you so desire, even though that's ethically and legally frowned upon.