[MarkusWandel]

I argue the opposite! Phone cameras, while hardly perfect, are easily on par with the sort of cameras people used to do street photography with, and improving constantly.

I too remember the "no photos" rules - in the pre-smartphone era. Technically you weren't even supposed to bring a camera in to the workplace (though this was mostly unenforced).

Now you can take pictures and videos of everything, willy nilly, and nobody bats an eyelash. With a camera that you always have with you, whether you anticipated taking photos that day or not.

And yeah, you can't play shallow focus games (notwithstanding that the phone will fake shallow focus with algorithm). And you don't get real zoom (pinch zoom doesn't count).

Oh, on the "real camera" front. Show up with a Canon SX30 ("big" camera, lots of glass in front) and people might notice. But show up with an SX210 (these are cameras I happen to have) and you can get great stealth shots with its 14x zoom but no one the wiser. It's just a small point and shoot, harmless, right? This thing is leaps and bounds more capable than a camera that size back in the pre-digital days.

I'll bet a Gopro will get a pass too.