Surveillance Camera Man

About

Surveillance Camera Man is a mysterious YouTube prankster who records video of random strangers in locations around the city of Seattle, Washington without their permission.

Online History

On October 10th, 2012, the photography news blog Pinac^[5] published an article about a YouTube video featuring a man disrupting classrooms by recording students and teachers without their permission. The YouTube video has since been removed. On October 30th, Pinac^[7] published a follow-up piece referring to the prankster as “Surveillance Camera Man.” That day, a Facebook^[6] page titled “Surveillance Camera Man” was launched. May 22nd, 2013, the Surveillance Camera Man YouTube^[1] channel was created, with the first video featuring footage of people expressing frustration for having themselves recorded without their permission (shown below). In the first two years, the video gained over 380,000 views and 1,700 comments.

On June 25th, the Surveillance Camera Man LiveLeak^[2] channel was created, where two additional videos in the series was uploaded that day (shown below).

On July 11th, the /r/SurveillantCameraMan^[3] subreddit was launched for discussions about the video series. On June 17th, 2014, a seventh video was uploaded to the Surveillance Camera Man channel (shown below, left). On October 14th, an eighth installment of the series was uploaded to YouTube, which was subsequently posted on the /r/videos^[4] subreddit. In 24 hours, the video gained over 300,000 views and 3,600 votes (80% upvoted).

Reputation

On October 15th, 2014, The Daily Dot^[8] published an article about whether the pranks should be considered harassment and highlighted Internet comments speculating that the videos were staged with hired actors.