BORED housewives and househusbands, beware. While your spouse is away, be careful where you play.

He or she may soon subscribe to a new mobile-phone service that, using tiny wireless cameras concealed around the home, will record your every move.

So if, like Gabrielle in the hit American TV drama Desperate Housewives, you are partial to seducing the hired help, you may want swap the marital home for an outside venue.

The service, developed by an American surveillance company whose clients include the US Government, will allow a partner to receive on their mobile phone live pictures of what is going on back home from one or more wireless cameras. All that the suspicious-minded need to spy on their partner are an applicable mobile phone and the software.

The service, MobileMonitor, has proved a success in America, where it went on the market last year. Cenuco, the company behind the application, is now in talks with Orange, the mobile operator, to introduce it in Britain.

After internal trials, Orange has placed the kit into its approved applications catalogue and it will be available within six weeks. Negotiations about the price of the product here are under way.

Jordan Serlin, operations director of Cenuco, said that the application had developed from an earlier version of the product that was used as a “nanny-cam”. That product, MommyTrack, was aimed at parents seeking to ensure that the au pair at home was not harming their child while they were out. It soon became evident that the application had a wider use.

With MobileMonitor, the partner need never know that they are spied on because the camera is wireless and only a few inches tall. It could be hidden easily. The system can show pictures from up to four cameras strategically positioned around the home.

Cenuco’s service is likely to be in great demand here: one in four British marriages ends in divorce after a partner has committed adultery.

A study conducted last year by Policy Exchange, a think-tank, suggested that Britain had one of the highest rates of infidelity in the Western world: more than four in ten people admitted to having had more than one relationship at a time.

Under the Data Protection Act, there are strict controls on how personal information is collected and processed. Within the Act, there is a special category for sensitive data on matters such as people’s sex lives and religious beliefs.

Lawyers said that the MobileMonitor could be affected by this, but that it was questionable. Brinsley Dresden, head of media brands and technology at Lewis Silkin, the law firm, said: “There are many exemptions in the Data Protection Act under which, though the rights of an individual subject may have been infringed, it may still be permissible to use the material which has been gathered. If you can prove there is a legitimate reason for recording, then you would not fall outside the law.”

The MobileMonitor will also allow the user to store up to 24 hours of footage to watch at a later date. The pictures can be transmitted to multiple users.The application, which costs $299 (£158) in America, is being promoted among those who have third-generation (3G) handsets with internet connections — such as the Orange SPV C500 or a PDA.

Analysts said that for the mobile phone operators such applications are valuable tools in their effort to promote 3G to a wider audience. The new phones — which enable the downloading of music videos, games and made-for-mobile television clips — appeal to the youth market. But if operators are to claw back the £22.5 billion spent on acquiring the third-generation licences, they need to make the phones appeal to a wider audience.

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