Cameron Diaz recalled her realization when people first started taking pictures of her on their cell phones.
During her appearance on Skip Intro with Krista Smith, Diaz reflected on her initial reaction to seeing camera phones for the first time in the early 2000s and how she realized privacy would no longer be a thing. According to the actress, she was on a promo tour in Tokyo, Japan, with her Charlie's Angels castmates Drew Berrymore and Lucy Liu when a large group of people began using their phones to get shots of the trio.
Diaz said the crowd was holding their phones over their heads, and the actresses couldn't figure out what was happening until their host told them they were being filmed. The women were shocked, and Diaz knew that the world was about to change thanks to camera phones.
"We literally, like, the wind was knocked out of us, and we looked at each other. Drew, Lucy, and I just looked at each other and like almost started crying. It was like that it just flooded us," said Diaz. "We were like, 'oh my God, it's going to be everywhere. We're not going to be able to do anything. If everybody has a camera on their phone and everybody has phones. It's over. Like it's over."
The first commercial camera phone was the Kyocera Visual Phone VP-210, released in Japan in May 1999. The product became extremely popular, and by 2003, the rest of the world caught on. More camera phones hit the market, eventually outselling digital cameras. By 2010, there were over one billion camera phones worldwide.