Is it ever okay to film strangers in public?

The experience of realizing you are being surreptitiously filmed by a stranger is now a relatively common one, but this is how it happened for Mitchell Clark: The 25-year-old was working a shift at his Atlanta Target when someone propped up a phone nearby. “I thought it was for some dumb prank channel,” he says. It wasn’t until a young woman bent over directly in front of him, her dress short enough to expose her entire bare bottom, that he realized what was going on.

The resulting video captures his shock — his eyes widen and his hands grasp his chest, agog — and later ended up on the OnlyFans model’s account. “It made me look like a creep,” he tells me. The video was an extreme example of a trend where women secretly film men’s reactions to them, often in or in , either to shame the men for being inappropriate or to highlight the power of their own beauty — in Clark’s case, arguably both.

But this time it caused an uproar: After Clark about how uncomfortable he felt, other accounts reposted and responded to it, highlighting the ways in which public filming culture had gotten out of control. (Vox was unable to reach the model for comment.) It’s been a decade and a half since social media made it possible for anyone’s camera phone video to go viral.

But it’s , a platform where overnight fame is more achievable than ever, that has turned filming strangers in public into a controversial cottage industry. While on Vine, , and Instagram have long used .