Caught Snapping

Martijn Van Es, a Web editor for Amnesty International in the Netherlands, had given up on his missing phone, until he started getting e-mails from friends. "They wanted to know," says Van Es, "why I was taking photographs of teenage boys."

He wasn't, actually. The kids in question had gained possession of the phone and used it to shoot themselves horsing around. They didn't know that the phone was subscribed to ShoZu, a service that automatically uploaded any cellphone snapshots to Van Es's public Flickr account. Van Es took the photos to police, who said they couldn't help -- no one knew whether the teens had stolen the phone (a crime) or merely found it (not).

So like any self-respecting webphile, Van Es got an idea: crowd-sourcing. He posted the teens' photos on his personal blog, and within a day his visitors shot from 250 to 28,000 as hoards of commenters mocked, forwarded, sleuthed, mocked some more. By the end of the week, he'd traced the kids to a local school and was fielding dozens of junior high-ish e-mails: I can ask X to find out if Y knows if G stole the phone.

Meanwhile, he was growing scared of the cybermonster he'd created. These were just kids. Comments were getting vicious, and "all of these personal details were outed about them," says Van Es, which made him concerned. He does work for Amnesty International, after all.

Eventually an exchange was arranged, and the photos were taken down from the site.

"But if I'd have known what I know now, I wouldn't have written anything on my blog," says Van Es. "Six months later and the phone was broken" anyway.

But that's the Internet for you -- no take-backs, no do-overs.

Crowd-sourcing as mystery-solving "does more harm than good in almost every case I've seen," says Daniel Solove, a George Washington University law professor and author of "The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet," who studies this sort of thing. "The mob tries to one-up each other," the punishment doesn't fit the crime, the cybermob meets the lynch mob and one really hideous two-headed monster is born.

Which we totally, totally get.

Except that . . . These people. Are taking photos of themselves with stolen phones. And then unintentionally sending records of their every move. Directly to the people who are trying to catch them.

Aaaaaahahahahahahaa.

The sheer idiocy is what makes it funny. What makes it compelling is the idea of anthropomorphized phones sending S.O.S. signals, secret missives back to their original owners. Find me. Find me, I am all alone with strangers. Find me!