July 13, 2004
Camera phones: Peeping Tom's secret weapon
This article from the Independent via near near future, sheds a disturbing light on camera phones, porn and privacy issues.
"The rapid growth of camera phones has had a sinister side effect - men taking sneaky snaps up the skirts of unsuspecting women, which are then pored over by a global audience of voyeurs.
"It's impossible to put an exact figure on it, but it wouldn't be an exaggeration to suggest that tens of thousands of women are unknowingly appearing on pornographic websites.
"Upskirt" voyeurism predates the internet, but the internet has given it wings - Google returns more than four million results (71'000 when I tried just now - sureley all these websites are not all fed by camphone shots!) Some of that is professional porn staged to look vaguely clandestine, but sites offering pictures of women taken without their knowledge or consent are both widespread and popular.
And voyeurism is going mainstream. ProjectVoyeur was the first free site to mix pictures sent in by willing amateurs with furtive shots of unsuspecting women in public places. It attracts more than 600,000 visitors a day, along with scores of contributions from Clicking Toms around the world.
PrivateVoyeur is another site that attracts more than half-a-million viewers per day. [ Both are hard core and though I didn't spend a great deal of time in either of these places, the pictures that I did see look like they've been taken willingly, definitely with the person's consent ]
"Dr Michael Johnson is an American psychologist who specialises in sexual addiction, and has treated men who take and distribute "upskirt" porn. He says: "The ease and low cost of this kind of voyeurism seems to be driving the increase".
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