AU mobile picture device ban opens can of worms

Citing the need to protect people's privacy, the YMCA today recommended all its facilities introduce the ban after initiating one at 110 of its Victorian sports and aquatic centres.

The Royal Life Saving Society of Australia today publicly supported the recommendation for the first time, revealing it had quietly alerted the aquatic industry to its concerns over the use of mobile phones with visual recording capabilities three months ago.

The RLSSA has advised more than 3,000 public swimming pools across Australia to introduce the ban and suggested private pools do the same.

"Our concern is really with the current generation of mobile phones in that they have Web-cams built into them," said Royal Life Saving Society of Victoria chief executive, Norm Farmer.

"They're so small and compact; we're concerned about people's privacy, and private parts being shown to all and sundry".

Farmer recommended that pool facility managers incorporate spot-checks for questionable use of mobile phones into their existing change room supervision routine.

"One option is that they don't initiate a call whilst they're in the change room and they don't answer a call while they're in a change room," he said. "If they want to do either, then they remove themselves from the change room and they either make or receive their call once they're outside".

The announcement is bound to create headaches for lawmakers, who are already struggling to balance the concerns of privacy advocates against what some in the wider community view as beneficial uses for visual recording equipment in public domains such as security.

And Australian surf lifesaving associations have appeared at the centre of that debate before. It became heated last year when photographs of teenage volunteer life savers were published on an erotic Web site. The incident prompted the Victorian Attorney General to ask the Victorian Law Reform Commission to review the state's surveillance laws.

However comments by Farmer today indicate the scope and scale of the issues facing state organisations when forming policy on the appropriate -- or otherwise -- use of visual recording devices in circumstances where an individual may be entitled to a degree of privacy.

According to Farmer, in the case of the Victorian teenage lifesavers the issue was not whether the individuals were captured on camera but whether displaying those images was an abuse of their privacy.

"A beach is public place and someone wants to get changed down into the nude on a beach they do so knowingly that it's a public place and then anything can happen," said Farmer.

"A changeroom in a swimming pool is, in my mind, not a public place. People who are getting changed in a changeroom would have a reasonable expectation that they do so with a reasonable level of privacy and an expectation that they're not going to have their private parts plastered all over some sort of public medium, whether that be a newspaper or a Web site or even stored in someone else's personal computer for future gratification," he added.

But while the logic of the YMCA and RLSSA's ban recommendations rest on these principles, authorities face a tougher decision when individuals move outside the changeroom to the beach or pool.

Some believe the principles apply equally when a visual recording devices moves outside the changeroom.

In January this year, the Gold Coast City council (GCCC) intervened in Surf Life Saving Queensland's (SLSQ) plan to install surveillance cameras on Gold Coast beaches.

Surfers Paradise Councillor, Rob Lacastra, said the special nature of people's dress behaviour at beaches would require the council to consider the privacy implications of SLSQ's proposal carefully before sanctioning it.

At the time, Nigel Waters, convenor of the Australian Privacy Council said beach-goers have a right to expect some level of privacy when visiting such a space.

"It's not a quasi-private space like a mall. To some extent people can choose not to go into malls but people should have the right to go onto beaches without being under surveillance," said Waters.

If the debate goes in favour of privacy advocates law makers could be a difficult position of having to reconsider all the spaces in which it is aceptable to use a mobile phone fitted with a camera.