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

https://petapixel.com/2023/11/06/korean-smartphones-have-mandatory-shutter-sounds-8-in-10-want-it-muted/

by Stratoscope • 3 years ago

44 70 3 years ago

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

gruez2• 3 years ago

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.

cubefox2• 3 years ago

"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.

vGPU• 3 years ago

Is this related to the same creepshot epidemic from Japan?

tromp• 3 years ago

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.

fbdab1032• 3 years ago

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

EForEndeavour• 3 years ago

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?

gruez2• 3 years ago

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.

EA-3167• 3 years ago

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.

13of40• 3 years ago

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.

xanderlewis4• 3 years ago

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.

least• 3 years ago

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.

potatopatch• 3 years ago

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.

guraf• 3 years ago

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?

goranmoomin2• 3 years ago

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.

illwrks• 3 years ago

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'.

flotzam2• 3 years ago

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.

wjholden• 3 years ago

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.

mrkramer2• 3 years ago

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.

gnicholas5• 3 years ago

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

chatmasta• 3 years ago

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

threeseed4• 3 years ago

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.

mrkramer2• 3 years ago

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.

threeseed4• 3 years ago

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

It really isn't public photography by any definition.

threeseed4• 3 years ago

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...

xanderlewis4• 3 years ago

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

petre2• 3 years ago

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.

Manuel_D• 3 years ago

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.

flotzam2• 3 years ago

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

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

falcolas• 3 years ago

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

crazygringo• 3 years ago

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.

zwog• 3 years ago

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

xanderlewis4• 3 years ago

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

jjcm• 3 years ago

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.

mcny2• 3 years ago

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.

Izkata2• 3 years ago

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.

TheRoque2• 3 years ago

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.

dharmab• 3 years ago

iOS uses geofencing. Android typically uses the purchase region.

WD40ForRust2• 3 years ago

Android wins again!

gnicholas5• 3 years ago

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...

TheRoque2• 3 years ago

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.

xanderlewis4• 3 years ago

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.

1-62• 3 years ago

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.

1-62• 3 years ago

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.

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

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