‘They caught me’: Apartment building announces sky-high searches for eye-melting topics that will ruin your childhood

When living in an apartment building, there are a lot of things that you may or may not want your landlord to know about. For example, whether or not you put nails in your wall instead of using Command strips, or that the temporary wallpaper you put up could be less than temporary, the cat you have living in your unit that the landlord has yet to discover, or even what you search up on building-wide Wifi, are all really none of your landlords business. Unfortunately for the residents in this viral TikTok, their building management has decided that tenants’ browser history is a building-wide issue that they have taken upon themselves to solve.

This particular resident entered the elevator up to her apartment to see a notice posted by her building management. The notice shared that building WiFi watched hundreds of devices accessing bestiality websites daily, saying that they pulled data which indicated 32% of residents have searched for bestiality content during their leasing period. To solve this problem, which is both none of their business and probably not even a problem, building management decided to block any searches containing the words “Judy Hopps” and “Animal Crossing.”

Commenters were quick to call out the total invasion of privacy that comes with the fact that the building knew any of this information at all, several of them pointing out that that was probably the bigger issue. Others simply shared the TikToker’s total disbelief at the posting, although many said they knew exactly which Animal Crossing characters people were looking into. One commenter even speculated that the signage was just the landlord trying to cover his tracks; “Dude I think the landlord is trying not to get caught with viewing people’s history and is making up an excuse.”

It should be noted that, if the signage is accurate, residents searching these terms are likely furries, not zoophiles. One Quora user notes that the differentiation is that zoophiles (or people who practice bestiality) are sexually attracted to actual animals, while furries have an interest in fictional animals with human-like qualities, and may or may not be sexually attracted to them. Someone can be both, but they do not always overlap.

As for the landlord jumping to this conclusion via their tenant’s browser history, Avvo agrees that this is generally a no-no. Lawyers recommend contacting the FCC and asking whether such actions are compliant with national regulations, and some even say that you can sue if you aren’t given unfettered access to the internet and satellite on your property.

That means that the 32% of residents who are, according to the landlord, scouring the internet for bestiality can come together and sue them for jumping to that conclusion and humiliating them via elevator signage. Then maybe internet searches can go back on the list of things your landlord simply doesn’t need to know.