Unmediated reports that an Israeli company, Natural
Widget, is now

selling an application which will automatically record
your mobile phone conversations. Although it's apparently
dependent upon the limited storage built into your phone
(assuming you have the Nokia Series 60 phone it works with),
the application is being sold for precisely the reasons
which I've argued will lead us to a world where everything
is seen, everything is recorded, and not by the government,
but by us all.

NaturalRecorder brings effortless
call recording to everyone, allowing to bring back any
important information that happened during phone calls.
[...] Never forget important information relayed by
phone again. [...] Think of NaturalRecorder as an
extension of your own (brain) memory: instead of
remembering (hardly) the last 3 minutes of conversation,
you'll always have a ready-to-use recording of as many
minutes as you want (depending of your mobile phone
memory - about 60 kilobytes per minute).

The obvious next step with this will be the ability to
offload the recordings, initially to removable memory cards,
then (as high-bandwidth mobile networks roll out) to remote
storage on one's personal computer.

The need to hang onto copies of what sees or hears is one
manifestation of an information saturated, "attention
deficit" culture. We are hammered by so many sources of
stimulation, many specifically designed to attract our
attention, that relying solely on fallible human memory can
be risky. This situation is, sadly, more likely to get worse
than to get better -- efforts to reduce the amount of
attention-grabbing stimulation in general often has the
perverse result of heightening the effect of individual
sources of stimulation. We're more apt to see further
development of coping tools, such as devices to
automatically record what we say, hear and see for later
review.

The Participatory Panopticon won't arise out of a single,
clear choice -- it will come from myriad smaller, rational
decision and technologies, all intended to solve very real
problems. It's important to recognize when we've moved
further along this road of good intentions -- and to think
hard about the ways in which we can make certain our
eventual destination gives us more than it takes away.