The Kaohsiung District Court early this month ruled against a hotel over the sale of items from a guest room that contained genetic material to a private detective agency, in a case that could set legal precedents for privacy rights.
The plaintiff, a man surnamed Chen (陳), said that the O House Hotel had violated his privacy when it sold sheets, blankets and towels from a room he used to private detectives employed by his wife, sources said.
Chen’s wife used genetic material collected from the items as evidence in adultery proceedings to show that he had extramarital relations, resulting in financial losses, sources cited Chen as saying at the district court.
Chen argued that he did not consent to the sale of his genetic material and demanded NT$600,000 in compensation from the hotel and staff, the sources said.
The hotel did not dispute that staff members sold items from Chen’s room to the detective agency, but asserted that the hotel has the right to dispose of its property as it sees fit, the sources said.
The judge wrote in the verdict that the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法) should apply to genetic material and that it is reasonable for guests to expect that DNA samples would not be taken at hotels, they said.
Chen was awarded NT$80,000, although the hotel has filed an appeal to a higher court, they said.
Shilin District Prosecutors’ Office lead prosecutor Ke Yi-ju (柯怡如) said that the verdict was “unusual.”
Detective agencies routinely pay hotels to obtain samples of genetic material that clients could use in adultery lawsuits, Ke said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching