Caught Snapping

How tantalizing, to think that while we continue to live our lives, our phones go on entirely new adventures.

Such was the fascination of Ben Clemens of San Francisco, who gained minor Internet fame two years ago when he was the first ShoZu user to discover that his phone -- stolen on an Amtrak -- would just keep uploading, regardless of who took the photographs.

For weeks, Clemens would log onto his computer and find a picture of a Chihuahua. A car. A woman having a snack. Children. Ambiguous fragments of his phone's new life, displayed for Clemens's viewing pleasure. It was voyeuristic and intriguing, like stalking the blog of a person you barely know.

"The photos did stop appearing after a while," says Clemens, as the phone's new owners either learned to disable the ShoZu function or discarded the device. "I was quite relieved at that point." Otherwise, who knows if he could have torn himself away.

David McDonald of Melbourne, Australia, was similarly more curious than angry, when he logged onto Flickr earlier this year and found that his phone, pickpocketed a few days before, had recently attended a street festival.

There it was, "having its own little field trip," cavorting with guys McDonald didn't know, in a neighborhood he'd never been. "I spent minutes and minutes blowing up the photo and analyzing it," says McDonald, a Web designer. He saw that the photograph in question was taken on a Sunday and used the date to determine which celebration the picture must depict. He scoured the photo for contextual clues, considered traveling to the scene to put himself in the mind of the phone.

"It's a bit of a detective story," he says, "like the myth where someone steals your garden gnome. . . . After a while, I sort of thought it was funny."

And so technology advances, crowds become vigilantes, criminals are caught . . . and David McDonald periodically checks Flickr with a mixture of obsession and excitement, wanting to see what antics his phone is up to now.