Technological advances
seem to be giving some people apt avenues to express their lack of moral
sense.
The very recent hoopla
in the Celebrity world -Solange, captured fighting Jay Z on an
elevator- was actually the result of the sinister psyche of a Standard Hotel
employee.
The employee in question
recorded the live feed of the incident from the security office of the hotel,
after which he sold the footage to TMZ. According to Page Six, the employee had shopped the video for
five days before selling it to TMZ for a whooping $250,000... Erm, that's a
little over N40,000,000 around here. The management of the
hotel counts the recording a confidential security footage of their clients'
private life as a breach of their security policies. Thus, they have handed
over the info of the offender to criminal authorities...
The Washington Post highlights that the leaking
security footages is becoming increasingly popular. And worse of all,
businesses are finding it difficult preventing it from happening:
The prevalence of smartphones and the ease of which people can simply and surreptitiously hold up their own mobile devices and record security videos has led to this boom. In the Jay Z clip, check out the shaky camera work and those green dividing lines that reveal other shots from different security cams; the leaked clip of Rep. Vance McAllister (R-La.) kissing his district office staffer had a similar look, making it clear that what we saw was a video of a video.And that, experts say, is a new privacy breach that is nearly impossible to stop. At the end of the day, it’s simply not an issue that a security system or individual company can predict – especially when someone spots a goldmine moment on a surveillance camera and starts to see dollar signs.“It would be very, very difficult to prevent,” said Jeremy Warren, innovation vice president at security company Vivint. “If you have human monitoring of video in a hotel or office building, preventing someone who’s able to watch these videos and do something like record it on their phone? It’s not very easy to do.”What is incredibly easy, however, is for the person that filmed the footage to ship it over to TMZ. (The gossip site was the first to show the Solange-Jay Z video.) It’s becoming very common for people to want a quick payday, or the kind of online micro-stardom that comes with uploading a really popular video that can be anything from a celebrity tantrum to an everyday woman texting while walking and falling into a fountain at a mall. There’s an ingrained temptation to share and try to profit that’s hard to resist.By name alone, security footage is supposed to be, well, secure. Most times, it is. But security experts agree that there are many new challenges that have led to a much higher risk of videos getting out into the public.In other words, in this day and age where folks are getting top dollar for leaked footage and photos, no one is safe. Privacy deactivated.Was $250,000 worth it to that employee? More than likely…
But would you give in to the temptation of becoming rich at the expense of someone else's reputation? What would you do, if you had control of that footage?
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