Photo: Monty Rakusen (Getty Images)
Have you ever tried to let your freak flag fly on vacation but had the creeping feeling that you were being watched? No, couldn’t be! That’s just your paranoia talking, right? Well. Maybe you’re not exactly wrong.
Last week it was discovered that a subscription website had secretly live-streamed the activities of 1,600 guests in 42 hotel rooms across South Korea, using hidden cameras. For those of you who have streamed a good voyeur cautionary tale and thought the day would never come, well, there you have it.
It’s like watching the Super Bowl champs give a speech, thinking they’d never get knocked off their podium.
Beat them at their own game: Everything You Need In Your Medicine Cabinet To Convince Snoops You’ve Got It Together
Father knows best: 20 ‘Shameless’ GIFs William H. Macy Should Use in His Own Defense
Follow Mandatory on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Hidden Camera
-
Unsuspecting People Have Become 'Premium Content'
The website in question (hosted outside of Korea, authorities said) broadcast its videos to over 4,000 members, about 100 of which paid an additional fee for premium content. Four men involved in the operation, which had taken place between November 2018 and March 2019, were apprehended and remain in custody.
-
But The Spies Can't Quit Their Day Jobs (Yet)
While the invasion of privacy is discomfiting, what we can’t shake is the feeling that this website didn’t have a very good business model. For all the trouble these guys went through to set up dozens of 1-millimeter cameras in 30 separate hotels across 10 different cities, build a secure website, and risk serious prison time, all they made in the four months since launch day was $6,200. Split four ways, that’s only $388 per month. They could have made more money selling chocolate door-to-door.
-
Spying Is The New Porn Genre
With cameras getting smaller and easier to hide, there has been a rise in secret recording. In January, a man staying at an Airbnb in Miami discovered a hidden camera over his bed. And he’s not the only one. It appears such cases are on the rise. But while most of these reports focus on individual perverts, the culture in Korea reveals a different scene: an organized business enterprise that has built an industry on such fodder. So much so that police have started a campaign against it.
-
Privacy Takes A Holiday
Maybe these guys are the new face of peeping tom culture, or perhaps they’re just opportunists trying to capitalize on a world without privacy. With smartphones and social media recording everything we do, peer-to-peer fixation on other people’s lives, and companies like Glassbox (who enable iPhone apps to secretly record our screen activity), our world is putting less and less stock in personal privacy.
-
No Dick Pics Without Consent
But hey, with all due respect, if someone is going to get a random (totally reciprocal) dick pic of us, we would like to choose whom.
