Phone sex: the technology trap

Prasanth P Delhi

It's not the kind of notoriety that anyone gets school citations for, but in today's 15-seconds-of-fame world, it's probably not that hard to live down: two 17-year-old students of Delhi Public School (DPS), R K Puram, one of the Capital's leading public learning factories, sparked off a media-police-judiciary-school administration feeding frenzy just by capturing on a camera mobile phone a sexual lark. It was a 2 minute 37 second episode that then crawled its way into the MMS ether and into cyberspace, seeping into and through the Kharagpur Indian Institute of Technology's (IIT) local area network and on to an Indian FMCG-and-auction Website. CDs of the adolescent peccadillo, burnt by the shark-school of entrepreneurs that is a pandemic in the world of information technology, soon found their way into the sleazy IT markets in India, selling for Rs 50–125.

Apart from the sensational nature of the whole episode — overarching adolescent libido, selling porn, cutting-edge skulduggery, cyberspace shenanigans, online marketing, trans–national law-and-order, police overkill — what it throws up are ethical and regulations-related issues that communication technology-racked societies, like ours, are finding difficult to countenance.

The response to the scandal was typical of a society that is uncomfortable with technology and change. Expectedly, the two school students involved in the romp were expelled and others who spread the sleaze around were also suspended. An IIT student was arrested for peddling the same clip on a leading auction Website, and later the CEO of the website was arrested. After that everyone was debating and crucifying camera phones. Where one group lobbied for stopping the usage of camera phones, others had an opinion about making sure camera phones are never bought or sold, or used in schools.

There has been a bit of a concern about camera phones for sometime, particularly about how it stealthily captures the images of unsuspecting people. Due to this, camera phones have been banned in locker rooms. Some women, too, have been accused in the US for capturing others in the buff and selling those clips to the fast expanding porno web-market.  But the MMS scandal' is not really about sex taking place in a school environment. It is really a manifestation of the school authority's and parents deep-seated fears about how this platform can be used by students. The same incident could have been captured through webcam, or a video camera, but that is not really the issue. The real issue is the speed at which the clip has been transferred through the MMS, Bluetooth and other technologies. This has given the incident a different energy altogether. Due to this reason, the DPS video became the clip the entire diasporic Indian student community was lusting for. Internet and mobile telephony community had indeed made the world a small place.

Is there a way to stop such things from happening? Sure, there is. The simplest way? Don't shoot it.

Technologically, there is no way to detect pornographic images or such material being transmitted on cellular networks, without completely stopping MMS or mobilising a couple of thousand people to screen each MMS manually, which makes it physically impossible. Moreover, technology usually finds other ways if one gets blocked. A few safeguards, however, have been implemented in camera phones already. For example, most new camera phones make a loud clicking noise when they are used so one can't be discreet about it, which does make it a bit difficult for voyeurs. As technology evolves, future phones may also support switching cameras off on phones via some sort of jamming signal.