Check out this post at Maggie’s Farm. It’s a discussion of smartphone cameras and the single use device they’ve largely replaced. From there you can go to Smartphones vs Cameras: Where things stand in 2022 and what’s to come.*
It all boils down to this:
“Other than professionals with specialized needs, or the most serious hobbyists, does any ordinary person need a camera anymore?”
If you read through them you get a great overview of camera capacity, lenses, what they can do and not do… and logically, for the normal non-hobbyist it becomes clear. Dedicated cameras are toast.
I disagree! Smartphone cameras are just fine but they left out the part where smartphones themselves are built and programmed specifically and irredeemably as snitch-machines and dedicated human manipulation devices. My phone takes excellent photos, it’s quick and easy and pretty idiot proof. But everything it does with the otherwise fine imagery is a hassle or privacy violation.
If I take a photo with my iPhone it gets paired with all sorts of metadata. Then it goes through what I can only call “the great NSA funhouse of human management and creepy domestic spying“.
To begin with, the smartphone that took the image knows the time, date, location, identity, and a great deal of other information about the photograph and the camera owner. No matter how diligently you turn off your GPS, you can’t trust that it’s off. You can’t take a photo that doesn’t have time and date attached. There’s no such thing as a photo that’s “just a pretty sunset”. It’s a piece of data about who was where at what time and it can be added to a whole study of how this image fits in with thousands of other images.
The phone that took the photo is as good as a personal tracking device. A photo taken by Curmudgeon’s phone can be reasonably assumed to be taken by Curmudgeon… who was present at the scene and probably wielding the camera. If he’s in the photo you can ask who was holding it. If he says he wasn’t there you can ask him to explain how and why he was not in the vicinity of his phone. Most phones are protected by a passcode so there might even be a legal basis to assume Curmudgeon consented to the photo. Isn’t it presumed that he unlocked the phone that has the camera? Gotcha!
Put on your tinfoil hat and think about where the file goes. Does it stay on the phone? Maybe. But it also migrates to the cloud. The technical definition of “cloud” is “data storage you don’t control”. The photo wanders around the ‘net, gets touched inappropriately by the NSA, and invariably winds up in some sort of online shared access database. Your “photo” database probably also propagates to your other linked devices… such as an iPad or just your Apple account.
Only an idiot would think that destroying the phone after the file has wandered to the cloud will eliminate it. Wiped the file? Like with a cloth or something?
There are a lot of idiots out there. Don’t be one.
Once a photo is on the cloud, you can never know who gets to see it. If you delete it you can never know if it’s deleted. If you lose the device which took or stored the image, it will simply respawn. In some ways that’s super funny. It’s precisely how we got this bit of comedy gold:
It’s about more than privacy violation. It’s about manipulation. If I take a photo on an iPhone it is one click to post on social media (with all sorts of privacy violations included) but a huge slog to remove it from the sandbox where it lives. If you take a photo on a smartphone, you and your photo become the smartphone carrier’s bitch.
Your photos become their property and a good reason for you to stick with Corporation A or Corporation B. This is a bigger issue than you think. How many little old ladies continue loyally using phones from Carrier A or B because they’re afraid to lose photos of the grandkids? Furthermore, when the connection is severed, your images, which were their property are gone forever. You’ll never find a dusty old smartphone in dear departed grandma’s belongings and pull up ten year old images of little Suzy on the swingset. That image was “data” and it was no longer available six weeks after granny died… in accordance with the “user’s agreement”.
Whole generations of photos and memories can, will, and have, gone away with time. In the old days they’d reside in shoeboxes and fade gradually. Now each photo is instantly available until it’s totally gone; in the blink of an eye. Do you think a modern Apple account will last longer than a former generation’s shoebox full of black and white wedding photos?
I wonder not “if” but “when” it’ll be another step on our current ongoing cyberwar. (Yes, it is current and yes it is ongoing.) If you can lock a Canadian trucker’s ATM card, can you lock Gammy’s photos of the kids? Suppose, Gammy voted for the wrong party and once bitched about Medicare services, due to her wrongthink she’s a terrorist. So why not lock her Apple cloud account so she can’t see her photos of her long dead corgi? Serves the bitch right! Go ahead and ask some Silicon Valley twit if they’re worried about Gammy’s old corgi. Am I wrong? Is what I said less likely than any other weird thing that’s happening in 2022? (Vladimir Putin is at war right now and still has a Twitter account. Donald Trump was deleted from Twitter during his actual presidency. Nothing is too stupid and irrational for modern times.)
I’ve been present many times when someone took a photo on a phone and will gladly text it to me but it has to be within a system. They would have a cerebral implosion if I asked them to e-mail or print it. They don’t really control the photo at all. They don’t understand even the concept of controlling their own digital information.
Apple, a pox be on their soul, stores shit as *.HEIC. I don’t know that this file format does other than piss me off but I know it pisses me off. If I want to yank one or fifty photos from the Apple cloud and stuff it on a thumbdrive in a non-Apple location, I have to go through an elaborate download process. I have to go to my “real” computer (i.e. running an OS that I actually, if barely, control) and log on to Apple. Apple could, if it wished, sever that connection at will. Then, after I’ve given ritual submission to Apple, I am granted the ability to download from the cloud to local. From there I can get it into *.jpg or some other less proprietary format.
If I want to scrape off metadata (and I want to do so with every fucking photo by default) it’s another few hoops to jump through… and I’m never really sure it’s clean. Unless you’re a hell of a hacker, you aren’t either. Like me, you can only click “remove the following forms of metadata” in a third party application and hope for the best. Did it work? Who knows?
The point is, if I take a photo of a squirrel’s ass with a smart phone and want to post it with some modicum of privacy on this little blog… I’ve got to navigate a shitstorm of traps. All this to produce a *.jpg of a damn squirrel.
Fuck that.
I have a cheap knockoff GoPro. If I take a photo of a squirrel, you know what I’ve got?
A photo of a squirrel.
That’s a huge selling point for a dedicated camera. It will take a photo without getting all up in my grill.
The GoPro can’t spy because it doesn’t know shit. It doesn’t know where I was. It doesn’t know which GoPro took the image. It doesn’t know that A. Curmudgeon of Bumfuck Egypt owns the camera. No part of the device knows my banking information, my political affiliation, or what I ate for breakfast.
A GoPro names the file something logical like 2022-03-14-XXX.jpg. Theoretically, it knows the date, but it only knows whatever date I tell it. I can set it up to take photos dated to the war of 1812 if I wish.
Once the file is created it’s just a file. I can copy a *.jpg from the GoPro to anywhere else. Without genuflecting at the memory of Steve Jobs. I can take out the memory chip and stuff it in my pocket. I can stuff the memory chip in my computer. I can throw the camera in a lake. I can feed the memory card to my cat. I can, if I so choose, copy the photo for safekeeping on any cloud I want or I can keep it local or I can delete it.
When I delete a photo from a GoPro, it’s gone. If I drop the camera while I’m fishing and a gator eats it… the photo’s gone. That’s what I want of my photos. I want them to be just a photo… not a small piece of a greater database called “Curmudgeon’s NSA Dossier”
Each time I take a smartphone photo, some small piece of my independence and privacy was just eroded. That’s why I use a cheap ass GoPro whenever I can.
Incidentally, none of this implies I have some dark secret double life. Most photos I take are of the “which order do these washers go on the bolt” variety. I take lots of photos of part numbers and stupid shit like that.
Being circumspect with privacy is just basic human mental hygiene. It doesn’t mean I’m a corrupt asshole like Hunter Biden. I don’t don’t have to worry about photos respawning from the cloud that show me passed out in a room full of Ukrainian hookers with a crack pipe in my mouth. Why? Because I’m not an idiot crackhead who does freaky shit.
Personal privacy can and should be boring. It doesn’t imply you’ve got illegal behavior to hide. Maybe you’re just a fully realized adult who wants to be left alone. Unlike Bit Bleaching Hildabeast who ran her own State Department shadow communications network I can use a GoPro to take a photo of my cat with a clean moral conscience.
I want to enjoy the level of privacy formerly associated with human dignity. I intend to be that way until I die. If you could crack the story behind every photo I took all you’d get is the secret location of some of my favorite fishing holes. And a lot of pictures of bolts.
Privacy and free movement of your own images; that’s reason enough to have a camera that does nothing but take photos. I suppose I’m the last guy, or at least the last generation, to think that way. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
A.C.
*I notice the article about 2022 has a 2020 byline. I’m going to assume it’s a typo. If it’s the work of a time traveler it’s a very boring one that missed far bigger events in the last two years.