A Taiwanese man has received a five-month prison sentence after using a robot vacuum to record his wife with another man.
The unnamed man and his wife married in 2021 and lived with his parents.
They also owned a holiday home which they visited occasionally.
During a visit in 2023, the husband found an unfamiliar toothbrush inside the property.
He checked footage from the parking area and noticed a man who had previously driven his wife home from work.
His wife denied having an affair when he confronted her.
Three months later, the husband remotely activated the camera on their robot vacuum through a mobile application.
Reports said he originally wanted to surprise his wife by speaking to her through the machine.
Instead, the live camera showed his wife with the same man inside the holiday home.
The husband continued recording them and saved the footage as evidence.
He later filed a civil lawsuit against his wife and her lover. He demanded NT$2 million in compensation for violating his marital rights.
The court found that their relationship had gone beyond normal friendship.
It ordered the wife and her lover to pay the husband NT$500,000, about $17,000.
However, the wife filed a separate criminal complaint against her husband for recording private and intimate activity without consent.
The husband argued that his actions were legally justified because another court had accepted the recording as evidence.
The court rejected his defence.
It ruled that marriage does not remove a person’s right to privacy.
The judges also said the vacuum’s lights and voice alerts did not prove that the wife knew she was being recorded or agreed to it.
The court sentenced the husband to five months in prison and ordered him to pay a NT$150,000 fine, about $5,000.
Taiwanese law allows prison terms of up to three years for recording or revealing another person’s private activities without their knowledge.
