Dilara was on her lunch break in the London store where she works when a tall man walked up to her and said: “I swear red hair means you’ve just been heartbroken.”
The man continued the conversation as they both got in a lift, and he asked Dilara for her phone number.
What Dilara did not realise was that the man was secretly filming her on his smart glasses - which look like normal eyewear but have a tiny camera which can record video.
The footage was then posted to TikTok, where it received 1.3m views. “I just wanted to cry,” Dilara, 21, told the BBC.
The man who filmed her, it turned out, had posted dozens of secretly filmed videos to TikTok, giving men tips on how to approach women.
Dilara also found out that her phone number was visible in the video. She then faced a wave of messages and calls.
This is so fucked up, and the guy who did this needs to be doxxed and have his whole life made hell, but…
Back when the ubiquitousness of smartphone cameras was still fairly new, and the prospect of being secretly recorded and posted online at any given moment was still unthinkable yet real, I tried raising the concern whenever/however I could.
Like, I would tell people “this is fucked up, and we shouldn’t normalize this.” And you know what they told me, nearly without fail? They called me a creep and said if I wasn’t doing anything I wouldn’t want people to see online, then I wouldn’t be worried about being secretly recorded.
It was like this pseudo “women’s empowerment” sentiment where they thought this gives them the ability to ruin men’s lives (often over short clips out of context that only look bad based on how it’s spinned in the caption), thus “protecting” women, and they didn’t think it would ever turn back on them and blow up in their faces.
Unbeknownst to them, one of my main concerns was the danger this poses for women. But of course, no one would believe that, because I was a man, so of course the only reasonable assumption was that I was a misogynist and only concerned with privacy so I could get away with predatory behavior. So of course, if I raise a fuss about this then I must be a creep. Of course.
Well, look what’s come home to roost. Amazing. Who could have predicted this?