Once upon a time a close friend of mine (let's call him Mick) was telling me about his adventures in a far-off country and how he happened to take some photos of a high-profile celeb (who I will not name). For various reasons he was apprehended by local security guards who forced him to remove the camera's memory card and format it to delete the photos. They requested he do this, not once, but twice. The guards thought that by running the format twice, it would definitely wipe the card and photos would be gone, and the celebrity who had paid them a gizzillion dollars to stop such things happening, would never find out about it. Unfortunately, these guards had never heard of 'Recuva' and we were able to quickly restore the pics on the card.

Today, there is no such thing as 'gone for good' when it comes to digital content. The examples of privacy breach by camera phones are many, recently Lara Bingle - in the past we've seen the likes of Candice Falzon put under similar scrutiny. All snapped by phone camera and everyone has wondered, 'how did this get out' OR 'who sent this one around'. There have been plenty of less well known cases where a picture taken at a particular time has told much more than a thousand words. 

When camera phone's first burst onto the market taking Nokia from the number phone company in the world, to the number one camera company too, I remember thinking how cool it would be to have a camera in your pocket all the time. See something cool, 'snap'. Watching something and no digital camera in hand, my phone will do, 'snap'. "Oh my God, I need to record this" 'snap' - and so it goes on. Youtube has been founded on the keen sense of camera work done by amateurs many with camera phones. 

But the price we are paying for this convenience is starting to show, maybe it has been coming for a while. I often talk about 'digital finger prints', the evidence we leave when we are online. These could be statements made on a message board, pictures taken and posted to Flickr, or a video uploaded to Youtube. All these capturing mechanisms can record now, play and load later.

More recently though, and as the length of time camera phones have been in existence, the digital time capsule has emerged. Pics, video and audio, which have been recorded a long time ago and may never be loaded to the internet, are now beginning to surface yearas later, showing people or actions that are not meant to be seen. Often it is when you have moved on, and are a totally different person that this occurs.

Do you have a digital time capsule? Has some one captured something of you in the passed that if it surfaced would embarass you? Fingers crossed, the answer is NO!