A Taiwanese man was sentenced to five months in jail and ordered to pay more than $4,700 for using a robot vacuum to secretly record his wife’s affair.
While the court ruled that the husband had violated his cheating wife’s privacy, the Taiwanese man also won a civil lawsuit, resulting in his wife and her lover being ordered to pay him thousands in compensation, according to a report by the South China Morning Post.
The Taiwanese man, whose name has not been made public, married his wife in 2021. In September 2023, he found a used toothbrush at their holiday home, prompting him to review security footage from a parking garage, which reportedly revealed an man driving his wife home.
Three months later, the husband remotely activated the robot vacuum cleaner inside the home, and discovered his wife engaged in an intimate encounter with another man via the robot’s live feed.
From there, he began recording footage of his wife’s affair in order to collect evidence he had planned to use later for a legal claim.
Video footage reportedly showed his wife changing her clothing, embracing the other man, and moving about the house naked while her lover lay on the sofa.
After that, the husband sued his wife and her lover, using the recorded footage as evidence in the lawsuit — for which he sought NT$2 million (approximately $68,000) in damages — claiming that his marital rights had been infringed upon.
The court ultimately determined that the wife and her lover’s friendship had gone beyond an ordinary friendship, and ordered the two to pay the equivalent of $17,000 in compensation.
But then his wife countersued, accusing her husband of recording private footage without of her consent. The man argued that his actions were “legally justified,” because the videos had already been accepted by the civil court.
The husband’s defense was rejected by a court, and ruled that marital obligations do not invalidate a person’s right to privacy. The man was then sentenced to five months in prison and fined the equivalent of approximately $4,727.
Taiwanese law reportedly states that secretly recording or disclosing someone else’s private activities or intimate information without their permission can result in a prison sentence of up to three years and a fine or more than $9,000.
Alana Mastrangelo-Wrask is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on Facebook and X at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.