In this paper, we propose a viewing direction based least significant bit (LSB) data hiding method for 360◦ videos. The distributions of viewing direction frequency for latitude and longitude are used to control the amount of secret data to be hidden at the latitude, longitude, or both latitude and longitude of 360◦ videos. Normalized Gaussian mixture models mimicking the viewing behavior of humans are formulated to define data hiding weight functions for latitude, longitude, and both latitude and longitude. On this basis, analytical expressions for the capacity offered by the proposed method to hide secret data in 360◦ cover videos are derived. Numerical results for the capacity using different numbers of bit planes and popular 360◦ video resolutions for data hiding are provided. The fidelity of the proposed method is assessed in terms of the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), weighted-to-spherically uniform PSNR (WS-PSNR), and non-content-based perceptual PSNR (NCP-PSNR). The experimental results illustrate that NCP-PSNR returns the highest fidelity because it gives lower weights to the impact of LSB data hiding on fidelity outside the front regions near the equator. The visual quality of the proposed method as perceived by humans is assessed using the structural similarity (SSIM) index and the non-content-based perceptual SSIM (NCP-SSIM) index. The experimental results show that both SSIM-based metrics are able to account for the spatial perceptual information of different scenes while the PSNR-based fidelity metrics cannot exploit this information. Furthermore, NCP-SSIM reflects much better the impact of the proposed method on visual quality with respect to viewing directions compared to SSIM. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. open access