How many cameras do you own? At least one for every computer, mobile phone, or tablet that you use. Many of them have two cameras (front and back), and now the Amazon Fire Phone has four cameras for tracking your face movement in addition to the normal device camera for your use.

The ubiquitous nature of cameras on our devices these days, not to mention on the buildings and in public spaces around us, means that the ethics are changing too. Users should no longer assume that the camera on their phone is only for pictures and the occasional video chat.

Cameras are for much more than that now, and companies are only beginning to imagine the ways they can use your camera to invent new features that you will pay for. As software developers and entrepreneurs, it’s up to us to drive the changing ethics of how these cameras will be used, and what customers know about them.

The Amazon Fire uses the four corner cameras for tracking your head movement in order to implement 3D effects and what Amazon calls “Dynamic Perspective”. This is undeniably cool, but it remains to be seen if the marketplace deems it useful or just a gimmick.

Amazon Fire is only the beginning

Regardless of the success or failure of the Amazon Fire Phone, we can expect more of this. Amazon’s head tracking solution is very interesting, but not the only one out there.

Intel just released an instant messaging app called Pocket Avatars, whose main purpose is to showcase their facial recognition technology. The technology recognizes your facial expressions and movements and uses it to animate an avatar that accompanies your audio message to friends. I doubt Intel is trying to create the next great messaging application, but this showcase of their technology may lead to more practical projects or government contracts for those interested in analyzing facial expressions.

And let’s not forget about Google. Their acquisition of Nest and more recently, home security camera company Dropcam means that they will have access to more data about your home and thereby you. How they choose to use that data, or what we as consumers choose to share, will be interesting to see.

Will Google Glass ever catch on? Something like it will, and that is also going to lead to more creative and ubiquitous uses of cameras in everyday life.

This technology is not limited to big companies either. For example, developers are releasing free open source projects that help you to track head motions too.

These developments are not a bad thing necessarily … there are many perfectly legitimate uses of these technologies, and we’re certainly going to see more use of video cameras in browser based applications.

New technologies are driving the wider use of cameras

One of the technologies driving this growth in video camera usage is WebRTC. The RTC part stands for “Real Time Communications”, and it’s an emerging HTML5 standard that allows web applications to use your camera and microphone from simple Javascript code. WebRTC can be used to share video, audio, and data channels between browsers using an encrypted Peer to Peer connection.

WebRTC is not a full standard yet, and is not yet supported by IE or Safari, but that hasn’t stopped people from showing a lot of interest in the applications that can be built with it. My software development company is using it for clients and our own projects. We’ve written an e-book on implementing WebRTC, and I edit a weekly newsletter on real time technologies that includes new content every week from around the internet on WebRTC. Conferences are being organized around the world, and many people are blogging on this.

Google is a driving force behind WebRTC and eventually we can expect that Google Hangouts will be powered by WebRTC. Amazon has been a quiet leader in this space, with some evidence that their Kindle customer support tool Mayday is based on WebRTC.

The initial applications of WebRTC are mainly for video chat and customer service applications, but there will be much more creative uses of WebRTC in the future.

Normal web users will never know the term WebRTC. But what they will know is that video based applications are going to become much more widespread. What are the privacy and ethical implications of this?

WebRTC tackles part of the privacy concerns

The WebRTC standard already takes some of this into account. Most notably, a web site cannot use WebRTC to gain access to your camera or audio until you give it permission through a toolbar controlled by the browser. The browser tab in Chrome and Firefox will also display an icon indicating that it is using the camera or audio.

This provides a good level of insurance for users, but how we as developers choose to implement our applications still has ethical implications. For instance, when you visit a WebRTC site using an SSL connection in the browser, you only have to give it permission to your camera once. Subsequent visits will not prompt you for your permission again, and so you may not realize that you are being watched.

Recently when testing an application that we are developing, I found a bug where in some cases one participant in a video chat could accidentally hide the display of video in the other participant’s window (sounds weird I know, but there was a logical though accidental reason this could happen). In this case, it appeared to the other participant that the video chat was over, even though their camera was still turned on and they could still be seen.

If we could introduce a bug that accidentally leads a user to believe a call is over when it’s not, then someone with unethical intentions could certainly do the same.

A modest proposal for ethics in camera use

We regularly see news about what Edward Snowden revealed the US government and other countries are doing to spy on normal people, all in a misguided attempt to prevent terrorism. While the people involved in snooping on us may have the best of intentions, clearly it is too easy to cross an ethical line if you only focus on what technology makes possible.

This is true of private companies just as much as governments. As software developers and entrepreneurs, I believe we need to set the tone for what is permissible and what is not.

As a starting point, I propose the following ethical standards for building applications that use cameras.

#1 The user must know their camera is on

Don’t leave this up to the browser alone. It’s common in video chat applications to see a smaller video stream of yourself as you talk, and this is the simplest and most effective way for users to realize their camera is on. If doing so interferes with the functionality of your application, then you need to find another way to make it obvious to users. Think of “On Air” type indicators displayed prominently in your app.

#2 Allow for muting or pausing of video and audio

Users should be able to control their experience, even if it adds complexity to your application. If they want to pause their video so they can pick their nose, but keep their audio open, then you should let them have independent control of the video and audio streams. Giving them control of their experience will allow them to give you their trust.

#3 Disclose everything you are doing with the video

If you are tracking head movements, analyzing facial expressions, interpreting their mood, or performing screen captures, then you need to let them know in advance. Informing the user why you are doing this, and how it benefits their experience, will be enough for most users to trust that you have good intentions.

#4 Question the case for recording

Don’t record video conversations just because video storage is cheap. You shouldn’t record conversations with your customers just because you can. Make sure that recording of sessions will have some value to the user as well as your business. Disclose to users why you are recording the session. And don’t keep the recordings indefinitely, delete them on a regular schedule.

#5 Keep it Peer to Peer

One of the great advantages of WebRTC is that video conversations are encrypted and peer to peer. That means it’s much harder for a “man in the middle” to snoop on your conversation. The video streams are exchanged directly between the two users’ browsers without going through an intermediate server. This provides a level of security and assurance to customers that you should make into a selling point.

The disadvantage of this Peer to Peer nature of WebRTC is that it doesn’t scale well to video chats between more than 5 or 6 users. If you need to support larger conversations, you may look at a solution which has an intermediate media server involved that can aggregate all those video streams. This architecture though carries with it privacy implications, so if you can avoid it, you should.

#6 End sessions cleanly

Make it clear that the video session is over to all parties involved. Provide strong visual indicators when the camera is being used, and when it has been turned off.

Ethics above Technology

The Amazon Fire shows us that the camera is going to be used for a lot more than just video chats. Expect more of this in the future.

This is a good thing — in general. Users already understand the privacy implications of video chat and the “selfie” aspects of our society show that we are willing to share an awful lot of information about ourselves publicly. But users are just getting exposed to all the other things we could use their camera for, and so we need to make sure to take them along on this journey carefully and with eyes open.

As technologists, let’s not let our enthusiasm get ahead of our ethics.