At Cult of Mac yesterday, Leander Kahney wrote about a new Japan-only feature of the iPhone 3G:
The iPhone 3G in Japan has a special feature unique to that country: The camera always makes a conspicuous “shutter†sound when a picture is taken, even when the phone is set to “silent†mode.
The loud shutter sound is supposed to deter voyeurs from taking sneaky pictures up women’s’ skirts — or down their tops.
Don’t have anything particular to add here, other than the fact that it allows me to combine the iPhone and one of my favorite first-day-of-class etiquette stories: I have a colleague from elsewhere who had an upskirt photo taken of her while teaching. She wasn’t dressed provocatively–just crouched awkwardly while fiddling with a multimedia workstation. In that situation, the loud shutter noise wouldn’t have made any difference: The student in question was so self-impressed that he was cackling and showing it off to his friends. (Which led to her confronting him, which led to other consequences.)
That’s probably the difference between “smart-ass student” and “committed upskirt voyeur”: stealth mode.