Sony accidentally sold thousands of camcorders in the late 1990s that featured a night vision mode capable of seeing straight through people's clothing during daylight hours.

A closer look

Sony accidentally sold thousands of camcorders in the late 1990s that featured a night vision mode capable of seeing straight through people's clothing during daylight hours. The infrared technology was supposed to be strictly for filming nocturnal wildlife, but curious creeps quickly discovered that certain dark fabrics became completely transparent under the right lighting conditions. Sony predictably panicked when the news broke, issuing a massive recall and desperately modifying the hardware on future models so the night vision flat-out refused to function if the sun was out. It is a beautifully bizarre moment in tech history where an electronics giant accidentally mass-produced x-ray specs, proving that engineering oversights usually just lead to immediate, large-scale privacy violations