It's par for the course. Laws in response to moral panics tend to suck and inconvenience reasonable people while having simple workarounds.
Only yesterday I was reading a Reddit thread where someone new to Japan asked whether to inform the police of the apparently violent arguments his neighbours were having and the responses varied from "don't bother, the police won't care" to "make a noise complaint, at least the police will be interested". That's the least scary anecdote I have.
⁎ Probably not about Japan specifically :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fastest_production_mot...
As far as I remember Jphone, the company first heavily advertising camera phones, forced the shutter on its own to preemptively clear itself from any potential issue.
Every phone carrier from there had the choice to forgo the mandatory shutter sound but risk backlash if anything were to happen, as Jphone set a precedent. And they choose the safety move.
When the iPhone came, it would have just been a marketing quagmire to go with a mutable sound.
But of course that's also part of the issue. If 3rd party apps don't have to make a sound then what was the point of the law? The perverts can just use a 3rd party app and 99.999% of users have to deal with a stupid for no actual protection.
2nd, if you are in Japan pretty much everyone is used to the shutter sound.
Here's the thing you refuse to acknowledge (or perhaps didn't think through before writing) -- when someone is holding a P+S camera or bigger, everyone knows they're taking a picture. But when someone is holding a smartphone, you assume they are not taking a picture because 99.9% of the time phones are not in camera mode.
The point wasn't to ensure that all cameras made noise, it was to ensure that a phone couldn't be used as a secret camera in public.
Seriously, I struggle to parse the logic here: Do you think that creepers are taking actual full size cameras into subways for creepshots? Or are you thinking they're using "Spy Camera" type devices? Because the people the law was meant to deter generally aren't that level of creeper, and their creepshots are a crime of convenience not a premeditated act of sexual assault.
Their whole argument boils down to regular users not being able to download an app from the app store?
Wow. You're right, I assumed their argument was a lot better than that. Oof.
I require consistency, so either EVERYONE is inconvenienced, or EVERYONE can circumvent it without issue.
The part I missed is the justification for inconsistent and illogical arguments where magically your ability to be inconvenienced is based only on your desire to be a creep.
In the meantime any pervert (the claimed reason for the law) can use any non-phone camera or for that matter any other camera app than the built in one