Korean Smartphones Have Mandatory Shutter Sounds, 8 in 10 Want It Muted | Hacker News Reader

Korean Smartphones Have Mandatory Shutter Sounds, 8 in 10 Want It Muted

petapixel.com

44 pointsStratoscope71 comments

> South Korea has a problem with unwanted, clandestine photography relating to upskirting and when mobile phones were introduced, authorities moved to stop perverts from taking photos of people without permission.

1. My mind is blown that this oddly specific behaviour was apparently so common that the government mandated all cellphone cameras must play shutter sounds that cannot be muted. What the hell?

2. Do third-party camera apps also trigger the shutter sound? What about recording a video? If not, doesn't this law just push pervs to snap video instead of still shots while unnecessarily degrading user experience across society?

>1. My mind is blown that this oddly specific behaviour was apparently so common that the government mandated all cellphone cameras must play shutter sounds that cannot be muted. What the hell?

You're missing the other possibility: incompetent politicians writing bad polices to respond to the latest moral panic. Plane hijackings are pretty rare, yet we have TSA screening and no liquids over 100ml on flights.

The rarity of plane hijackings is balanced by the decades of harm they can do, even beyond the obvious death and destruction. 9-11 for example led to 20 years of ruinous war, trillions wasted, and many lives lost, not to mention geopolitical realities which led to even more death and loss of money. Taking extreme caution to prevent a recurrence of that, not to mention protecting lives and a whole industry, probably doesn't compare to upskirt shots.

the extreme "caution" was the issue

Good point. I am sure the US won't just think of another reason to go to war...

> 9-11 for example led to 20 years of ruinous war, trillions wasted, and many lives lost, not to mention geopolitical realities which led to even more death and loss of money.

9-11 led to cockpits being secured. The rest was politically motivated, and does nothing to prevent a recurrence of 9-11.

Yes locking the doors == good

Making me buy over priced water == Security theater that does nothing for safety

We do not need to be illogical about it, extreme government over reach should not be excused when a simple door lock was all that is needed

The water ban came later for a different reason, namely the "Liquid bomb" plot, which involved bringing liquid bombs onto planes and detonating them mid-flight. I'm not saying the ban was an especially good reaction, but cockpit doors wouldn't have helped. You don't need to be in the cockpit to bring a plane down with a bomb.

Right but the original context was "another 9-11" that would lead to "decades of war". We have clear examples, right or wrong, where bringing down a single plane would not result in that response by a nation state.

One of the reasons we have not seen another airplane based terror event, is not because of security, but because it simply would not invoke the response the terrorist desire. They want a nation to over react, to bomb things, to over all make the lives of the people they purport to be fighting for "freedom" on behalf of worse... This keeps them in power, and aids in recruitment.

Taking down a single plane does not do that, using that plane as a missile did, which door locks prevents.

This is from the same country that prohibited blood in video games in the 90s. I had a copy of Duke Nukem that I picked up from some street vendor in Seoul that was identical to the American one, but all of the blood was colored white. I'm not sure that seeing a monster's head explode in a shower of what I will generously refer to as "milk" did anything positive for my moral alignment.

Reminds me of when I watched Fist of the North Star several years ago. All of the blood spurts were censored to be bright white, but there was one episode where two dead guys were drenched in blood and that wasn't censored for some reason .

The most hilarious though is in part 3 of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. The main character is a minor so they censor his face any time he smokes. But in one episode there's a bad guy who can imitate people's faces, and he imitates the main character and smokes (without any censorship).

This isn't much stranger than US American TV replacing "bad words" with beeps.

I would guess one outcome of that was a significant increase in bad words used on non live TV. Since they'll be beeped out it's not really big deal anymore.

Or inventing new bad words like Farscape. Don't even need to look most of them up, you'll learn at least frell, dren, tralk, and mivonks just by context and frequency of use.

To make it less obvious it was all about the FCC's rules, translator microbes didn't translate a lot of slang, whether it was Earth-swearing or not.

I have a couple of Nintendo Wii games where there's a setting for the blood to be red or green. Not sure if that was a requirement by Nintendo or just was something publishers at the time did but it did stick out in my mind back then as being silly.

> Plane hijackings are pretty rare, yet we have TSA screening and no liquids over 100ml on flights.

Without wanting to sound too sarcastic, it’s possible there might be an implication going on there.

I'm pretty sure any attempted plane hijacking after 9/11 would result in the hijackers getting mobbed by passengers.

> My mind is blown that this oddly specific behaviour

It's not oddly specific, it's just plain voyeurism.

> was apparently so common that the government mandated all cellphone cameras must play shutter sounds that cannot be muted. What the hell?

It doesn't have to be common for a law to be put into place. A Similar law exists in Japan as well.

> doesn't this law just push pervs to snap video instead of still shots while unnecessarily degrading user experience across society?

Yes, it's largely political theatre.

I've seen a couple people who I think were vigilante in their photo taking, but either I missed something (and the person photographed clearly did too) or they were a bit off their rockers..

To me it seems like a law that attempts to handle something that is also generally discomforting.. I.e. after that kind of an experience one can wonder if the under ground man has a collection of photographs of you for some slight you don't understand.

> while unnecessarily degrading user experience across society?

Does a shutter sound really degrades the experience unless you were indeed trying to take a stealth photo?

As a Korean, I can say definitely so.

A common example that I can give is when you want to take a photo of a document for future reference (or maybe even PDF submission) in a quiet office or room. I can definitely say that the mandatory shutter sounds create a lot of awkward moments.

That moment shouldn't be awkward if you have a legitimate reason for taking that photo.

And if you really need to record the document for other reasons (like whistleblowing), you can record a video...

Awkward isn't the right word here. It's a distraction or annoyance.

> That moment shouldn't be awkward if you have a legitimate reason for taking that photo.

Think of for example quiet libraries with a bunch of students quietly studying. They do not like other people making noise, however legitimate the reason is.

> you can record a video...

Video recording also has a mandated start/stop sound, FWIW.

I had a similar awkwardness when I tried to have a non-audio indicator for something when laptop screen was off.

When I was using my carrying my laptop around public places in town most of the day, before I'd close the laptop lid (which triggered an immediate suspend at some low level), I'd press a hotkey to "secure" the laptop. This locked the screen and started a process to zero various RAM caches, and scrub misc. temp/junk files. (Not that I needed that, but I was figuring out privacy&security at the time.) To indicate to me that it was OK to close the lid and leave, instead of doing a beep that might bother someone in a library or something, I flashed an LED for an instant. The LED available was the white ThinkLight at the top of the LCD, which was bright enough to illuminate the keyboard and nearby workspace.

You might guess how this could appear in a library. Sudden flash, as if from a cameraphone, in someone's peripheral vision, coming from the direction of a guy who is suddenly leaving.

So I disabled that indicator, because it seemed infinitely more risky and harmful than the threat of a spy neutralizing me and using advanced computer forensics on my laptop to recover a fragment of a high-value spam email.

I wonder if it's less a single action of taking one photo, but the collective noise of lots of people taking lots of photos.

With film photography people were be restrained with the cost of film and photo development, whereas now there's no restraint and lots of people take lots of photos of the most mundane things. I can imagine the noise and distractions of 'click, click, click' in public spaces, events, gatherings etc. An always on chorus of 'click, click, click,click, click, click,click, click, click'.

The noise is annoying per se, but also: stealthy != illegitimate. For example think of trying to document something abusive going on around you, and being betrayed by "your" tool.

More fundamentally, it's just not a tool's proper place to second-guess if its wielder is doing something illegitimate. You should be technically able to use your general computing device to launch a doomsday weapon if you so desire, even though that's ethically and legally frowned upon.

I remember hearing in South Korea about some US Soldier being imprisoned over a dispute where he repeatedly photographed a young woman, explicitly against her consent.

Some countries give you a right to your own image. This comes up often in Germany, where privacy law is very different from the US.

I know that in the UK, you can photograph everything that you can see in the public....not sure about rest of the Europe but I suppose laws are liberal as well. In the US, it probably differs from state to state.

On France there's the right to one's image, copyright on buildings, so good luck trying to be the next Cartier-Bresson.

Also: what if someone starts a screen recording and then opens the camera app?

In that case you may as well just take a video, which I'm assuming doesn't constantly make the shutter sound.

I think the reason is that on iOS if you are capturing the video it forces the screen on.

Where as with the camera you can turn it off. Hence the need for shutter sound.

How can you take a photo on iOS with the screen off?

Technically the screen is on but you can display a black image and turn the brightness all the way down.

On iPhone Pro it will also drop the luminosity even further once it switches to low power 1fps mode:

https://medium.com/codex/how-to-create-an-ios-app-that-takes...

Ah, I suppose you could also just use the accessibility switch to turn the white point all the way down, and lower your screen brightness all the way. At that point, the screen basically appears black.

Isn't public photography legal? It can be creepy but it is legal, at least in the "democratic" west. And btw all modern cities have cameras all around it so you can easily catch creeps if they cross the line of legality.

Most countries have imposed laws to ban upskirts and other types of invasive photography.

It really isn't public photography by any definition.

> My mind is blown that this oddly specific behaviour was apparently so common that the government mandated all cellphone cameras must play shutter sounds that cannot be muted. What the hell

It was and is extremely common. It's happened to my partner, many of her friends and has been an issue for years. And is not just contained to cell phone cameras but hidden cameras in general. Public bathrooms are such a hotspot that many women fear using them.

Not sure if it's an issue involving a lot of men or just a smaller more active group. But there is a lingering issue with how young Korean men think of women. For example in a poll, 76% of men in their 20s oppose feminism:

https://www.theglobalist.com/south-korea-anti-feminist-young...

Definitions of ‘feminism’ seem to vary widely (and are constantly shifting) so that statistic alone is hard to interpret.

Here's the Hollywood Reporter, adding context to an article about how the Barbie movie didn't do well in Korea:

'But in Korea, a country where gender disparity and anti-feminist backlash are prevalent, the film’s focus — albeit uplifting — on female empowerment may have sparked discomfort and even fatigue.

“Given how gender has been politicized and became a polarizing issue in Korea in the past few years, young people seem to be easily exhausted by discussions around gender,” says Kang Yu-jeong, a professor of Cultural Contents at Kangnam University in the city of Yongin. “It’s such a sensitive topic for the younger generation — the film’s main target — that they want to avoid it entirely.”'

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/why-barb...

The situation is pretty extreme. E.G. https://news.sky.com/story/plastic-surgery-south-korea-faces...

Both Korean and Japanese societies are quite paternalist, so I'm not surprised. In Korea they have all kinds of exaggerated expectations from women and the largest gender pay gap in the OECD.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/03/1135162927/women-feminism-sou...

There's also a book by Korean author Kim Jiyoung called Born in 1984 outlining this.

While South Korea is a deeply paternalist and sexist society and there are many disadvantages women face in Korean society, men in Korea do have compelling reasons to oppose Korean feminist movements. In particular, the government has instituted gender quotas in some industries:

> The flustered “angry young men” believe that government policies aimed at ensuring gender parity are in fact giving women an unfair advantage.

Enforcing gender parity when the workforce is majority male is indeed giving one gender an advantage. They don't "believe" these practices are unfair any more than they "believe" the sky is blue. If you want to eliminate discrimination, anonymize applications and take steps to eliminate the ability to determine the gender of applicants. Forcing outcomes is indeed putting your finger on the scale.

While there's definitely a lot of sexism and paternalism in South Korea, it was very unfortunate that explicit gender discrimination was path that feminist movements decided to take. It's very bad for feminism to create situations when anti-discrimination is a form of "anti-feminism". This severely curtails good will and willingness to work on issues like the one described in the linked article.

What's funny is that's it's not about "Korean smartphones", it's about "smartphones on Korea". A friend of mine bought an iphone in France, and when she went to visit Korea, it started doing the shutter sound. It's just purely based on the localization! Same applies if a Korean moves abroad, I assume.

iOS uses geofencing. Android typically uses the purchase region.

Android wins again!

That depends if you are a foreigner visiting Korea or a Korean who moved abroad...

Sometimes things can be different without everything being a competition between corporations and testing brand allegiance.

It sounds like people have differing experiences with foreign phones being used in Korea. [1] Perhaps it is based on what SIM card you have installed, as one redditor suggested?

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/14el5lr/phone_shutte...

I doubt it's the only thing. Me and my friend moved to Korea, had the same Korean sim card. Only thing that changed is that I have an Android (Xiaomi), and she has an iPhone. Mine didn't start to do any sound.

One time, a random stranger shot pictures of my little daughter at Costco. I confronted the creep and also reported him to the staff. Costco staff couldn't do anything about it but the manager offered to escort our family around. I appreciate every little tool to keep pervs away from ruining a good thing.

It's a minor inconvenience to many but it's a necessity to a few who desperately need it to keep safe.

What if I wasn't vigilant about my surroundings? Could someone weaker have been able to confront the individual? These are the many reasons why I welcome the camera shutter sound as a required feature.

As usual, GrapheneOS disables this kind of anti-user restriction:

https://github.com/GrapheneOS/platform_frameworks_base/commi...

This is one of my pet peeves about iOS as well. You’re able to customize and disable sounds of every noise the phone makes except the camera shutter. You can place the phone in silent mode to disable it, but doing so will obviously disable every other sound as well. Interestingly this also applies to screenshots. This typically leads to this learned behavior now whenever I’m taking a photo or screenshot:

Silence phone -> photo or screenshot -> unsilence phone

It’s a quite annoying anti-pattern.

You can’t even set the sound volume of music for example in a game separately from the volume of your alarm. If I want to lower the volume while I play a game or a YouTube video, I have to remember to increase the volume before I fall asleep.

Is there any Tasker-like app for iOS? One of the things I use it for on Android is to give every game its own volume setting, which is automatically applied when I start the game and automatically reverted to the previous setting when I close the game.

Yes, shortcuts is built into iOS. I have a shortcut to send me an email when I start charging my phone and when I stop charging my phone. I can’t get the current charge percentage though in the email body as a variable. :/

It is not for work or anything I just wanted to see what I could do with shortcuts automation.

How is this with videos? Couldn't you just start recording a video from a safe distance and than continue to creep around?

That’s true. It only mandates a sound at the beginning (and end?) of recording.

Is this related to the same creepshot epidemic from Japan?

It’s the same in Japan. I used to have a Japanese iPhone 8 that would make a shutter sound even on silent (in the UK), but apparently now the latest models decide whether to make the sound or not depending on the location.

Could this not be removed on an Android phone, or is Android in SK locked down to prevent this?

At the very least it can be removed by physically disabling the speakers. So any software measure (eg. locked bootloaders) isn't really worth enforcing too hard.

"Physically disabling" how? Opening the phone and disconnecting the speakers? In my phone the earpiece acts as a second speaker, so calls would no longer be possible either.

If you are really dedicated to the task of clandestine photos, someone could purchase a dedicated point and shoot. Or a secondary phone for which permanently disabling the speakers is not a concern. Or just shoot video.

Notably missing is the gender breakdown between the survey answers. Is it split equally, or biased along gender (and perhaps age) lines?

I don't know why you're being downvoted -- if there were ever a poll that should have a male/female breakdown, it's this one, since the issue by definition affects the genders differently.

> Japan and South Korea are among the only countries in the world

This "among the only" strikes me as a miscarriage of semantics...

If there are others (presumably very few) then please list them too.

Presumably a catch-all to avoid having to do research and/or missing an entry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com