#575: KinCam

The popular press carries a story almost every week about how some parent has been arrested for taking pictures of his own children at a school sportsday. The accusation is always that even an innocent photographer might unwittingly publish images of other people’s children on a public website. The thought of paedophiles downloading those images for their own purposes naturally fills parents with a range of emotions from distaste through horror to outrage.

Today’s invention is therefore a camera which can only take pics of the faces of one’s own children.

Certain digital cameras (’familycams’?) would be available only eg in fluorescent green, so that only this type could be used to photograph children at events without someone objecting. A photographer would first need to take a fixed number of photos of each member of his/her family. These would be stored as exemplars in the camera.

When taking photographs later, the camera would automatically detect all faces in the shot and obscure any that were not within the family set.