The insidious part is not the camera, but its melding with the cellphone. Connectedness with a mobile data network makes the photo almost instantaneously available - to other phones, to email and to internet websites. The potential for abuse of individual privacy is enormous.
I was reminded of the "upskirt footage" of one David Overend, who attached a tiny camera to his shoe so he could photograph up the skirts of more than 2000 girls and women before he was caught in 1997. Back then, Overend had to take his images home to process before he could trade them by email and through internet newsgroups. Today he could do it on the fly.
A week before the PXT incident, I had seen a more benign use of photo phones. Herald telecommunications writer Peter Griffin, who was doing research in Korea, used an LG phone and a CDMA EV-DO mobile network to send me pictures of himself enjoying the Denmark versus France World Cup game.
Until Raynish and Partners stepped in, that has been the usual way of promoting this technology - great for instant email postcards from abroad.
The possibility of covert surveillance by phone brings a new twist to our increasingly Orwellian society. We routinely accept cameras - on streets, in stores, on trains, in rest homes, at protest marches - to overtly (sometimes covertly) watch aspects of our daily lives.
Now, thanks to mass market photo phones, not to mention web cams, surreptitious spying is fast becoming a democratic right.
Tacitly sanctioned photo and video surveillance is done in the name of a safer society - to slow down speeding drivers, catch thieves, uncover fraud or abuse, avert accidents, stop crime.
But how easily the electronic sentry can become voyeur. How easily we give permission to shadowy figures behind the lens to invade our privacy, to subtly coerce our conformity.
Our readiness to accept such technology is picked up in Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report - a film of a future where surveillance is so successful that murderers are arrested before they commit the crime.
During a police sweep of an apartment block, tiny robot spiders invade rooms by sliding under doors to scan the irises of hapless occupants.
In one scene, a couple deep in a raging domestic pause for a moment to let the spiders crawl up their bodies to scan their eyes, then resume fighting a few seconds later as the robots scamper off.
Far-fetched, I agree, but iris-scanning identity technology is in use today and face-recognition software, which checks images from a crowd against a photographic database of terror suspects, has also been used in response to the events of September 11.
Thank goodness for the Privacy Act. Unfortunately, no. The act offers little protection against covert phone spies - the problem being vague definitions. Just what constitutes "personal information" about an "identifiable individual" that the act is designed to protect? Would a covert phone photograph fall under this definition? Or would the means of gathering personal information (in the form of a photograph) be deemed "unreasonably intrusive", as set out in Principle 4.
To my mind, yes on both counts, but under the act probably not.
In some instances, there may be recourse against stalkerazzi under the Films, Videos and Publications Act. Police in 1999 gained a conviction against a man for making a covert video of young dancers getting changed between acts in a Christchurch Operatic Society production.
The conviction was gained not because what was shown was "objectionable" in the normal sense of the act, but because it breached the women's right to privacy and degraded them to a significant extent.
The Law Commission's discussion paper Protecting Personal Information From Disclosure takes up the issue of better defining what we might reasonably expect to be kept private.
Information about health, sexual behaviour and financial position are rightly mentioned but, sadly, photographic information is not.
If we were really serious about protecting privacy, controls on the growing multitude of hidden lenses that watch and record us would be top of my list.
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Law Commission: Protecting Personal Information From Disclosure
