Cell phone recording feature raises hackles

In an awareness raising article, Business Week looks into new cell phones launching in Japan with a feature that lets people record calls -- and may soon raise privacy hackles everywhere. Experts are saying "it's as an illustration of the industry's tin ear when it comes to the legal and social effects of the most widely adopted and disruptive technologies ever created".

"Now, in the latest example of the cell phone industry's "anything goes" attitude, Japan's NTT DoCoMo and chipmaker Texas Instruments are planning to produce a device with the built-in ability to record phone calls".

Peter Royas on Gizmodo has a softer take. He points out that in fact Nokia and Motorola have a feature called "voice notes" in some of their phones which lets you record a few seconds of a conversation.

He cautions that this should not become "an overblown issue, à la the recent hysteria over cameraphones being used to take pictures in private areas. It's always been incredibly easy to record calls made with a landline and that it's just as illegal to tape record a phone conversation without the other party's consent using a cellphone as it is with a regular phone.

So even if every cellphone in two or three years has a call-recording feature built-in, it shouldn't really change a thing", he says.

emily | 10:02 AM | Technology |
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