The Internet Has Made Strangers Into Unwilling Performers

We are gradually losing something that has historically been taken for granted: the ability to exist in public without becoming a subject of public consumption. This is to say that, there is something increasingly unsettling about the way we have normalised recording strangers in public.

The proliferation of smartphones, social media platforms and, more recently, wearable recording technology has fundamentally changed our relationship with the people around us. Recording has become so integrated into everyday life that the presence of a camera rarely seems remarkable anymore. Restaurants, shopping centres, streets, public transport and social gatherings are routinely documented, often with strangers appearing somewhere in the frame.

But increasingly, strangers are not merely appearing in the background. They are becoming the subject.

Someone’s appearance, mannerisms, conversation, clothing or momentary behaviour catches another person’s attention. A phone is pointed in their direction, footage is captured, commentary is added, and an audience is invited to participate in the observation. What was once an ordinary encounter between people sharing a public space becomes a piece of content with an entirely different social life.

Visibility Does Not Mean Exposure

The justification is usually that the person was in public anyway. They were visible to everyone around them, so recording them should not be considered particularly objectionable. It is an argument that sounds reasonable until one considers how profoundly the internet has changed the implications of being seen.

There is a distinction between public visibility and public exposure, and treating them as interchangeable obscures the very issue at hand. Visibility is incidental to occupying a shared space. Exposure is the deliberate extension of someone’s presence beyond that space, often to an audience they have neither encountered nor consented to address. The people who happen to see you waiting outside a restaurant are not equivalent to thousands of strangers who can watch, replay, share and comment on a recording of you indefinitely.

The difference is not simply one of audience size. It is a difference in context, permanence, distribution and, ultimately, control.

A particularly revealing example emerged in January 2026, when the BBC investigated a growing trend of men secretly recording their interactions with women using camera-equipped smart glasses, subsequently uploading the footage as dating advice content. One of the women interviewed, a 21-year-old Londoner named Dilara, had been approached by a man during her lunch break. She was unaware that he was recording their conversation. The resulting TikTok video received 1.3 million views. Her phone number was visible in the footage, and she subsequently received weeks of unwanted calls and messages. Men even turned up at her workplace, recognising her from the video.

The significance of this incident extends beyond the obvious violation of secretly recording someone. An ordinary interaction was repurposed into content, stripped of the woman’s control over its distribution, and made accessible to an audience that felt entitled to participate in her life.

The person filming retained the ability to determine how the interaction was presented. The person being filmed inherited the consequences.

A similar pattern emerged in Manchester, where women were secretly filmed during nights out and footage of them circulated on social media, attracting hundreds of thousands of views and misogynistic commentary. Some women subsequently reported feeling frightened and less comfortable going out. The investigation eventually led to an arrest on suspicion of voyeurism and harassment. Police also discovered further material, including suspected non-consensual nudity and upskirting, behind paywalled accounts.

The Attention Economy

Social media has created an economy in which attention is both the incentive and the currency.

Content does not necessarily need to be meaningful, informative or even particularly interesting.

It needs to provoke a reaction. An unusual interaction, an awkward moment or a stranger behaving in a way that deviates from what an audience considers normal can be packaged into something entertaining. The ordinary lives of other people become an inexhaustible source of material.

This has consequences for how we perceive the people around us. Rather than simply witnessing an unfamiliar person, we begin to assess whether their behaviour is interesting enough to document. The camera introduces a potential audience into an interaction that was never meant to have one. A stranger becomes a character, their behaviour becomes a subject of commentary, and their image becomes something through which another person can generate attention.

There is an uncomfortable objectification inherent in this process. The individual is no longer being regarded primarily as a person with their own circumstances, experiences and boundaries.

They are being regarded through the value their image might have to someone else’s content.

The problem is compounded by the way short-form video encourages interpretation without context. A few seconds of footage are rarely enough to establish why someone behaved a certain way, what preceded an interaction or what circumstances might have shaped it. Yet audiences are routinely invited to make precisely these judgments. Captions and commentary provide an interpretation, and viewers are encouraged to accept that interpretation as the complete account of an unfamiliar person’s behaviour.

The person being filmed is effectively made to participate in a public narrative without being given any say in its construction.

This is particularly troubling because our understanding of privacy has become unnecessarily narrow. Privacy is frequently discussed as though it only concerns the protection of spaces in which other people cannot see us. But privacy also concerns the ability to exercise some control over the circumstances in which information about us is collected, presented and distributed.

Being observable does not mean every observation is appropriate to preserve and circulate. Nor is this simply a question of whether the person recording has broken a law. The legality of recording in public varies across jurisdictions, and there are legitimate reasons to document public activity. Recording evidence of misconduct, documenting events of public significance, journalism and ordinary photography all have important functions. There is a meaningful difference between recording something because the public has a legitimate interest in knowing about it and recording an unsuspecting individual because their appearance or behaviour might entertain an audience.

The distinction lies partly in purpose, but also in the treatment of the person being recorded. An incidental appearance in the background of a restaurant review is not equivalent to deliberately zooming in on a stranger, drawing attention to their mannerisms and inviting an audience to laugh at them. The camera may be the same, but the relationship between the person recording and the person recorded is not.

This is why I find the casual filming of strangers for amusement particularly difficult to defend. I recently came across a video of an elderly man waiting outside a restaurant. The person recording him appeared to be a food blogger, who drew attention to the fact that the man seemed to be falling asleep and commented on the unusual way he was sitting. The man was shown in considerable detail, despite having done nothing more than occupy a seat while waiting.

There was no discernible public interest in documenting him. There was simply an observer who found another person’s ordinary behaviour worth presenting to an online audience.

The man’s circumstances were unknown. He could have been tired, unwell, uncomfortable or perfectly content. But none of that seemed necessary to the person recording him. The observation itself was considered sufficient material.

What makes this kind of recording revealing is precisely its apparent triviality. We are accustomed to recognising violations of someone’s dignity when there is obvious humiliation, harassment or tangible harm. We are considerably less inclined to question the smaller, more casual instances in which someone is singled out, scrutinised and made available for public amusement. Yet the underlying assumption is similar: that another person’s presence in a shared space gives us considerable freedom to use their image as we please.

Who Gains, Who Bears the Cost

There is also something worth considering about the asymmetry of these encounters. The person holding the camera determines the framing, selects the footage, supplies the commentary and chooses the audience. They can walk away from the encounter having gained content, engagement and perhaps even income. The stranger, meanwhile, may never know they were recorded. If they do discover the footage, they may have little ability to influence how it is interpreted or where it travels. The benefits of the recording and the potential consequences of its distribution are not necessarily experienced by the same person.

We have, in effect, normalised a form of participation in which one person controls the production and another person unknowingly supplies the material.

Perhaps the most significant casualty of this culture is the right to be unremarkable. Ordinary public life requires a degree of social discretion. People need to be able to look tired, dress differently, behave awkwardly, make mistakes, have emotional moments and occupy space without every deviation from someone else’s expectations becoming potential entertainment.

These are not exceptional circumstances that warrant special protection. They are ordinary expressions of being human.

A society in which people must constantly anticipate being recorded is a society in which ordinary public existence becomes a form of involuntary performance. The responsibility for preventing unwanted exposure is gradually transferred from the person choosing to record to the person simply trying to live their life.

And that is an unreasonable reversal.

The internet has made it extraordinarily easy to extend the reach of an observation. It has not made every observation worth sharing, nor has it eliminated our responsibility towards the people who become part of what we publish. The ability to record someone is a technological capability, not a moral entitlement. The ability to attract an audience is not evidence that the audience was entitled to the material in the first place.

We should be able to share our experiences of public life without treating the people who happen to inhabit it as available content. There is a difference between documenting the world around us and assuming that everyone in it is ours to document.

Being in public means sharing space with other people. It does not mean surrendering the right to move through that space without becoming someone else’s spectacle.

Labiba Raida is a freelance writer, content creator, and the founder of LaNaz, a beauty brand.