Wave of Plastic Surgery Clinics Found to be Secretly Filming Patients

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Photo Credit: Meow/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 4.0

A NUMBER OF plastic surgery clinics across Taiwan have been found to have been secretly filming patients in treatment and operating rooms. In the initial wave of inspections, hidden cameras were found in five Airlee clinics in Taipei and New Taipei, as well as one Dr. Shine and two Saint Eir clinics in Taichung. Clinics where such surveillance equipment was found have been ordered to suspend operations for eight months and pay a 500,000 NT fine. Eventually, more than 30 clinics were found to be secretly filming patients.

The controversy began after a Threads post that went viral on May 2nd about an Airlee customer noticing, while changing, that a smoke detector in a treatment room was a hidden camera. Though staff at the Airlee clinic claimed that the smoke detector was just a smoke detector, the woman called the police, who opened up the smoke detector and found a recording device.

Among these clinics are Taiwan’s best-known plastic surgery clinics, which have sometimes worked with the government on advertising campaigns on public health issues. Perhaps the incident goes to show how extensive issues of individuals–usually women–being secretly filmed are. That this has increasingly become an issue is why public restrooms in Taiwan routinely display signs warning of punishments for secretly filming individuals in restrooms.

Taiwan confronts extensive issues regarding image-based sexual abuse, though Taiwan is not the only country in the region with these issues in an age in which AI and digital technologies have made it easier than ever for such issues to occur. The issue of “AI deepfakes” and “revenge porn” has received more attention in recent years, for example, particularly after Taiwan, too, saw a wave of #MeToo cases in 2023, as prompted by the television drama Wave Makers.

Notably, a 2021 arrest brought to light that a YouTuber, Xiao Yu, was running a deepfake ring on Telegram that circulated doctored images and videos of mostly female Taiwanese politicians, YouTubers, and other public figures. The deepfake ring has been compared to South Korea’s “Nth Room” incident and had over 8,000 users, some of whom commissioned custom videos of lesser-known, non-public individuals from the ring.

Controversy after the arrest led to calls to pass stronger laws to fight deepfake rings. Though measures may provide for the fining or blocking of platforms that do not comply with taking down images.

Criticism at the time was that the bill did not do enough to address the issues of how images on the Internet take on a life of their own, beyond where they were originally posted. After all, online images may continue to spread independently of the original post on social media or on a website.

Previously, calls to strengthen legislation to address the issue of sexually explicit images circulated without the consent of those in them ran up against Internet privacy concerns, such as sank the National Communications Commission’s initial draft Digital Intermediary Services Act in 2022. The Digital Intermediary Services Act also aimed to deal with the issue of revenge porn, deepfakes, disinformation, and the like, but was criticized because the scope of the regulations was seen as unclear and wide-ranging, and because it placed the onus on platforms to self-regulate.

At the same time, when it comes to the more recent scandal, the reason for the cameras in plastic surgery clinics may be in order to avoid lawsuits in the event of injuries during surgery leading to lawsuits. As such, even if much of the media framing has been around images being shared online, the issue at hand may be more related to when clinics violate privacy laws because they record clients to avoid such lawsuits. In this sense, the issue at hand may not be addressed.