Mobile phones with inbuilt cameras are officially banned in the Kingdom and continue to sell like hot cakes.
Users of these mobile camera phones, particularly the Nokia 6600, also known as the “Panda” in the Kingdom, are not confined to one category. Men and women, young and old, liberal conservative, all of them own them.
The fact that Saudi customs officials and police could confiscate the phones has not deterred people from continuing to buy them from the army of black-market vendors.
A recent program on Al-Arabia debated the use of camera phones in Saudi Arabia and whether they should be banned. The guests on the show were from the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia. The announcer first asked the Emirati guest how the UAE — which is considered a conservative country — dealt with the situation.
The guests said that when mobile cameras were first introduced, people were not comfortable with them, especially the conservatives.
But as they became more common, and laws ensured that those who misuse them in public or offend others would be punished and named and shamed in the media, people have become reassured. Now, the phones are common in the UAE.
The host then asked the three Saudi guests whether they felt banning such items violated their basic rights as citizens to choose what suits them in the mobile market.
One of the Saudi guests agreed. She said the fact that some people misuse such devices does not mean that the entire country has to pay the price. Anything, she argued, can be misused: The phone, television, and so forth. By continuing to ban new technology from entering the country on the basis that it could harm our ethics or damage our principles would keep us in the Stone Age, she added.
She also mentioned the importance of upbringing and the responsibility of parents to educate their children in a proper manner, telling them that it was wrong to violate the privacy of others. A child would then learn how to use his own sense of right and wrong in the future, and hence people could both keep their fundamental rights and practice the freedom to choose.
The second Saudi guest partly agreed with the first but said it would be hard to implement laws that would prevent wrongdoing in such circumstances. So the best thing to do would be to ban the phones altogether.
The third guest, who is a well-known writer in one of our dailies, said that she agreed that banning these mobiles violates the freedom of individuals to choose but said she understood what prompted officials to ban them. She said the people and society of Saudi Arabia were more conservative than any other nation on earth, and that certain things that are acceptable in other countries are not here.
She also mentioned the influence of traditions had on the country’s outlook and that the decision officials took, though it might violate people’s liberties, was for the best of the nation.
The fact of the matter is that advances in telecommunications, like other forms of technological progress, will not stop. It is part of evolution. I believe there will come a time when most mobile phones have a camera, and that that will not be optional but standard. It would not be rational to ban all phones.
I remember the days when mobiles themselves were just about to be introduced in the Kingdom. There was gossip and much debate. Some people argued that women and teenage girls would be corrupted by access to mobiles since they could easily hook up with boys. Monitoring mobiles would be more difficult than monitoring a landline. And though many still use mobiles for that purpose, the scare slowly dissipated and now almost everyone has them, even kids in elementary school.
Banning camera phones will not stop them being sold in the black market or smuggled in from abroad. The solution lies with parents and with public awareness.
We have to realize that we cannot go against the tide. But we can learn to go around it. One positive solution I have seen is that some wedding halls have female security personnel who check bags and confiscate visitors’ camera phones at the door. The visitor is given a number and can retrieve her phone when she leaves. That puts a stop to misuse of the phones.
Another solution might be punishing those who misuse the phones, and it would deter others.
Then we would feel that we are neither being left behind nor sacrificing our freedom to choose.
