I once worked at a company and amongst other things, we repaired camcorders (remember them?).
One day one of the guys was panning one around and he noticed that the new clock that had appeared recently in the workshop had a white spot.
The CCD sensors in even mobile phones pick up infrared as white light - try it sometime if you are bored: flip your phone to camera and point a tv remote at it whilst pressing a button on the remote.
Anyway, it turns out the company owner had decided to buy a covert spy camera.
He pulled a couple of still stunts like that over the years - turning off the beep on the front door so he could sneak in when people were doing overtime; putting a clocking in and out machine in just for the engineers (that backfired catastrophically as people went from staying to fix whatever the were working on to working to the clock).
It's not new behaviour even if it's abhorrent.