It's towards the bottom, but there's a good quote that shows the perfect example of when this makes sense:
> “For example, if someone is removed for a serious safety incident during an Airbnb reservation and we need to remove them and cancel their future reservations, and we then find that someone re-books the exact same future reservation with the same credit card number, we will remove the second account,” the company said.
So I can see how this is absolutely necessary in some cases, but also how there's always going to be a confusing gray area no matter where you draw the line.
It feels particularly crazy because if you travel together with a romantic partner who damages a property, and then you basically have to convince AirBNB that the two of you have broken up, and that the two of you aren't just using your account now to escape the other's ban.
I remember reading the story about Lauren Southern a few days ago, they banned her parents because they didn't like Lauren's politics (shes a very polarizing figure). I totally get bans when a guest damages property or breaks rules, but the whole reason this got kicked up in the news because that ban was just so overtly political.
They didn't ban her parents because they didn't like their daughter's politics, they likely had reason to believe Lauren attempted to circumvent her own ban by using her parents as a go-between or even through impersonating one or both of her parents (things like IPs, phone device IDs, etc can be used as signals although we all have to admit they aren't a smoking gun just hints). But due to legal risk are unable to disclose means or methods for how they did so or to comment publicly on the decision. So of course there's no way to prove this, but it would be typical of the types of systems that large tech companies' trust and safety systems use everyday. Ultimately with some situations like this they are making a judgment call and weighing brand risk if they get it wrong and retain a bad actor especially if said actor remains on the platform and does something even worse in the future VS the sort of injustice of removing a good actor due to being too careful/overly cautious. Guess which usually wins.
> But due to legal risk are unable to disclose means or methods for how they did so or to comment publicly on the decision. So of course there's no way to prove this, but it would be typical of the types of systems that large tech companies' trust and safety systems use everyday.
And the kinds of systems that produce Kafkaesque articles on HN every other day, where a transparent appeals process needs to be forced onto those companies by the government, or they need to be broken up by antitrust legislation.
That's gratuitous and done for spite only. I really don't want to do business with a company that seeks revenge because of internal political activism. It's gross. Within their legal rights as it stands today, but gross nonetheless.
IIRC they banned Southern not for her politics but for being closely associated to people who had unacceptable politics, and then banned her parents for being closely associated with Southern.
Brits arrest people for silently praying (so... standing) near an abortion clinic or teaching their dog to do a nazi salute. Not exactly paragons of sound judgement.
Brits are certainly not paragons of sound judgment, but arresting people who are making a public show of harassing women is one case where they are making a perfectly good judgment.
Quite an achievement being bad enough to get interviewed by the anti-terrorist police. Although I imagine if you told US border control that your intent in entering the country was to start fights and promote violence they wouldn't let you in either.
"Your politics hurt my feelings so you and anyone you know is banned from using my service."
How is this reasonable to anybody? Left wingers get mad when a baker pulls this on a gay couple but apparently it's ok as long as it's against someone they don't like?
It's the difference between refusing service because of an inherent aspect of someone (like their sexual orientation) and refusing service because someone is choosing to actively broadcast their highly inflammatory opinions.
The cake shop never refused service to anyone because of an inherent aspect of anyone (how would they know?).
They'd happily bake a birthday/retirement/graduation cake for a gay person.
They refused to use their own artistic talents to inscribe a message that they disagreed with. They refused to participate in the words, not the people.
Kind of like you might refuse to make a MAGA cake.
You know the baker didn’t refuse service and was happy to sell them an already made cake, he just didn’t want to make a cake with a gay couple on it, right? Are you really saying the multiple lawsuits weren't ridiculous?
In California, political affiliation is nominally a protected category. But not federally. So I think we as a society have decided some things are okay and some aren't and there's no real reason for much of it except rationalization. We've decided that sexual orientation is different from political affiliation and that's it.
For instance, how is it reasonable that, in many places, nipple pasties are legal but exposing a nipple is not? It just is.
Well, the specific reasons matter. Surely Airbnb should ban some people because of their political views (eg members of ISIS), the question is just what the line is.
I would argue that ISIS shouldn't be banned for their political views, but rather for their participation in a criminal organization. Punishing people for their political views pushes them towards extremism
What about Michael Knowles? He just went up on stage and called for "transgenderism" to be "eradicated" from public life [1]. Apparently, he shadow-quoted a Himmler speech while doing so [2].
For the safety of the Airbnb community and in particular the trans people in it, Airbnb should clearly ban him and his close associates. No?
Why should they ban some people because of their political views? Why should they ban ISIS members?
I can see banning people because those people damaged houses (out had the places damaged during their rental) but not for political views.
Whatever happened to "I may not like what you have you say, but I will fight for your right to say it?"
Do you mean they're trying to ban children from drag shows? Those are very different things. For comparison, consider that the US hasn't banned pornography but has banned children from pornography.
No, Tennessee has banned drag performances, period, with wording that makes it very easy to claim that any trans person in a public place violates it. (Easy enough that it seems likely to me that that's the intent.)
Because it seems pretty explicit that it doesn't apply in places where only adults are allowed. And how could a specification of people "who provide entertainment that appeals to a prurient interest" apply to any trans person in a public place?
The problem is that it's so broad that it can easily be abused. Many drag performances are not sexual (e.g. drag queen story time). Even those who are sexual are generally no more so than your average pop concert. They are a far cry from something like pornography or strip clubs.
> it doesn't apply in places where only adults are allowed
Like...in public.
Or in many other places where someone in drag might be.
Or in most places that a trans person might be.
Drag performances are not inherently sexual, and are not inherently intended only for adults. The idea that they must be sexual in nature is part of the propaganda being spread by conservatives to try to invoke the "think of the children" effect.
There are a number of places that have "drag reading times" at libraries that are very popular, just as a quick example.
Imagine you send an employee to a place where they have to stay in a hotel. Then, they trash it. REALLY trash it. Trash it so bad that it takes actual time to repair.
The hotel will likely use the credit card as the identifier. They'll also probably blacklist the company itself until someone really high up calls them and tells them sorry.
Of course, AirBnB is a little different and not being a company makes this harder. However, the practice isn't exactly unusual. If you're strongly associated with someone chances are that someone will tag along. Easier to ban both (or all) of you than one of you and hope the people left over are responsible enough (they usually aren't with enough guilt tripping). Especially in the case of a romantic partner the only option probably is to ban both you strictly because it's a near certainty your malicious partner will travel with you or have the ability to guilt you into letting them. Good luck telling your girlfriend/boyfriend to go stay at the Holiday Inn while you sleep in luxury in an AirBnB.
Hotels have support. You can actually walk into the hotel and speak to the manager if it comes to that.
AirBNB is a faceless website. If you're banned your recourse seems to be a support line or chat. Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
Meh, good luck going to the manager of your local instance of Marriott or Hilton or Hyatt and getting a corporate-level ban lifted. They're going to tell you that it's above their pay grade, and to contact HQ. HQ will ignore your attempts to contact them unless they come on the letterhead of a law firm. Maybe you can get a ban lifted if it was imposed by the instance, but even then, they're probably just going to tell you to go to HQ.
It doesn't matter if it's SPG or AirBNB: when you're fighting with a large company that (you believe) has made a mistake, the best/only path forward is to get a lawyer involved.
Difference being there are many hotels to choose from, and quite honestly, I've never heard of someone getting banned from a hotel chain (though I assume it has happened).
> Escalating onto social media can be quicker depending on your network.
Funny enough, Twitter was the best way to get CA DMV support during the pandemic. They'd DM you unlisted phone numbers to call and get things done that the regular website can't. This is the only reason I have a Twitter account.
In a hotel the decisions would be made by a reasonably competent human, and can be appealed to a human if there's a problem.
In Airbnb, the decision would be made by a black-box algorithm, and appeals would be directed to an outsourced monkey who is neither given the training, nor the information, nor paid enough to give a shit, if not stonewalled directly with a canned response.
The reasonably competent human at the hotel is the night-shift clerk making $13 an hour, and his manager, who makes $17, both of whom are utterly terrified of getting fired.
True, but this is still a major upgrade from the $1/hour outsourced drone working in atrocious call-center-like conditions trying to close as many support tickets as possible.
But as long as hotels exist, Airbnb is optional anyway, isn't it? Even ignoring hotels, there are plenty or real BnBs around. I have never felt the need to use Airbnb and haven't suffered from that.
I can't think of any competitors in the same space. Maybe they exist, but they're terrible at advertising. Hotels aren't the same industry. Completely different experience.
I've actually been hearing ads for Vrbo on a lot of the podcasts I listen to, so that comes to mind immediately for me. Searching for airbnb alternatives seems to suggest that there are a number of options out there.
This seems like claiming that a pizza place and a taco place aren't competing because they're completely different experiences - I'm still only going to eat one lunch, and I'm only going to use one service for lodging overnight somewhere
Well, just for the two you, they have combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants, so you can have a choice of pizza and/or tacos, depending on what you feel like eating at that exact moment!
Probably several signals including clustering via IP address.
A couple of years ago I discovered I'd been banned from AirBNB. They didn't notify me this happened and it was months after I'd last used the service (which left a good review), so I only discovered once I tried to log in much later. I know it wasn't related to the prior stay because they'd been emailing me to thank me for being a part of the "AirBNB community" for months afterwards.
As far as I could tell the only possible reason was that my girlfriend had a dumb moment and booked a place for a friend, and that friend then invited other people round in the apartment. It wasn't trashed or anything but the neighbours complained about the noise (they were playing loud music or something). So by the transitive rule of AirBNB: random person I never met makes too much noise once -> girlfriend banned -> me banned.
We weren't married and the accounts weren't obviously linkable in any way, except that we use the same internet connection. So presumably they're clustering based on that.
AirBNB claims in the article that it "employs an appeals process for people who feel they have been unfairly banned". This isn't true. The only way to appeal was to click a button, and because they don't tell you why you were banned and back then I hadn't figured out they were clustering users, all I could write was something like "I can't log in and don't understand why". Then you get a stock email back a few hours later saying the ban was upheld. That's not an appeals process worthy of the name.
I understand the chain of reasoning that leads to this sort of thing, but ultimately hotels don't pull this kind of stunt and have lots of other advantages so AirBNB is dead to me even if one day the ban is reversed. If the model AirBNB is using requires this sort of hyper-aggressive banning of users who have not actually done anything wrong then it's a broken and unsustainable model. Competitors like booking.com clearly don't need anything like this either, so that's where my business goes these days.
For convenience, Airbnb lets you send/share the itinerary with other guests via their platform. That's not literally every customer's relationship status, but it would be trivial to use that to ban known associates of bad actors.
Remember that recent case where a lawyer was denied access to Madison Square Garden, because their in-house facial recognition software recognized her being an employee of a law-firm that was litigating against another subsidiary / child company of the owner of MSG Entertainment?
Between this, and that case, I can't say I'm looking forward to the future (ab)use of tech.
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart (or some subsidiary of Walmart). Or that you get checked every time you try to use their self-checkout machines.
I would prefer privatized credit scores to centrally controlled. I would prefer i was on one bad person list as opposed to the only bad person list.
This coordination already exists on some level. If you rip off a hotel they may inform their competitors and share information. Generally they don't care so much about tweets or politics as they are just trying to run a business. But if it was state controlled it runs the risk of beung used as a tool to suppress dissent or wrong think.
Large tech unicorns like social media are kind of inbetween state actors and private businesses as we have seen from the high amount of communication between state actors and these businesses
To concur: We have been living with private, decentralized social credit scores of varying sizes for most of our social history. Imagine you are asked for a $1000 loan from: a family member/a good friend/an acquaintance/a total stranger. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with being selective.
These only get scary when they are centralized. You can live without Airbnb. A government-mandated no-sleep list would be life changing.
Agree. The other upside of private companies doing it is that they might shoot themselves in the foot if their business interests misalign with their "credit scoring" ones, and intuition shows the former will take precedence and subsume the latter. That is, Airbnb might find the limits of its own risk-scoring scope when normal people will get upset and not be able to consume their product, which has happened quite a bit already. The cool thing is that in a place like the US, the open market will then adjust itself and propose a new competitor which will happily take Airbnb-banned users.
I like having a reputation. I pay my bills on time and im happy for my creditors to share that fact to others. Similarly i don't trash hotel rooms, get into fights or engage in other antisocial behavior. A reputation make things easier as service providers can focus efforts on higher risk individuals
I do have a problem if I get thrown on a general bad person list based on something unrelated (e.g. criticized [politician]) or the state telling private parties they should not associate with me for whatever reason
You like sharing that you’re a reliable citizen with anyone. You (presumably) don’t like sharing every bit of information that goes into making that assessment, such as what you buy, when you sleep, where you go, how your heart rate fluctuates, whom you interact with.
What’s missing, in my opinion, is being able to prove that you have a good credit rating without revealing your bank statement. That your life insurance should be cheap because you live a healthy, low-risk life without revealing biometrics. That your car insurance should be low because not only did you never have an accident, you never break suddenly or travel near where accidents happen, but without revealing GPS or acceleration data.
And so on.
Zero-knowledge cryptography is not mainstream. I hope it will be.
> It's not that the US won't have social credit scores... they just will be privatized and opaque.
We already have a social credit score and it's privatized now. It's background checks.
From the story:
> While she does not have a criminal record, her boyfriend does, she said, telling Motherboard it was “a white collar charge,” though she did not go into specifics.
I find it a bit odd to let private companies do background checks when this really seems more of a function of government where as a society we can have input and reform the process.
In some European countries, people don't have credit scores, but when they're applying for a mortgage, they also need a collateral which costs about the same as the house or apartment they're trying to buy.
[citation needed]; which countries? Obviously a 100% deposit is an exaggeration, and 5-10% more normal depending on the market, so what's the true deposit number?
That collateral is usually the house or apartment that your are trying to buy. You can use something else, if you want, but usually it is the thing you buy.
It's not right to deride their social credit scores, when we've had them for decades, in the form of actual credit scores plus criminal records plus a no-fly list.
All these new developments are just slight changes to the system at its edges, the core of it is quite similar. But our society is myopic to its own problems.
Sorry, but it is absolutely right to deride their social credit scores even if we have our own similar system. As others have pointed out in this thread, ours have a completely different set of issues. Yes, they exist and should also be criticized, but saying that we can't criticize someone else's problems until we fix our own is bullshit. If that were the case, nothing would ever be fair to criticize.
Bollocks. This isn't a social credit score, this is one company blacklisting bad clients, and doing their best to ensure said bad clients don't game the system by using someone else's account.
Yeah I don't love the potential for ubiquitous tracking and judgment, but this isn't central government, it's AirBNB -- use VRBO, or Mariott, or Days Inn instead. Most hotels have, and have had for a long time, blacklists, too.
With the number of people who strongly advocate for stealing from Walmart, with seemingly no repercussions at all, I'm not sure that'd be such a bad thing.
People love to pretend like stealing from "big companies" is some robin hood adventure where the C-Suite is going to look at the numbers at the end of the year and decide they all need to cut their annual bonus to make up for the loss. When in fact prices go up for the paying customers, and jobs that used to help everyone (attendants who help restock, locate items, etc.) get converted to more "Security" jobs, where the worker does nothing but "look mean".
Imagine walking into a Walmart, only to get escorted out by security because someone you've been associated with caused a brawl, or shoplifted at Walmart
Society was much more liveable when that was considered common sense.
Some variant of what you're thinking about might've been possible in a small society (say, when the shop owner in a village knew all his customers, and was able to keep an eye on the troublemakers).
But in modern world it would basically mean that you might get banned from thousands of stores across the entire country because a cousin you barely know is an idiot. Or more likely, you'll just appear on the "do not serve" list without even knowing you're on in or finding out why.
So yeah, treating these two as the same thing is dishonest.
It was more livable for the more socially acceptable and/or wealthy segments of society not for the lower segments. Someone who is poor or otherwise on the margins of society is much more likely to be associated with people society considers "the wrong sort of people".
Similarly, those in the upper levels of society are discouraged from associating with the lower levels for fear of being associated with the wrong sort of people.
It would be normal for an individual known for shoplifting or assault to be blacklisted. Not some associated with an unsavory individual, which can be involuntary - coworker, family member, neighbor.
This made a splash after conservative commentator Lauren Southern claimed her mom was banned without ever booking anything for her daughter. I'm not sure why Southern was banned though but i doubt it was because she was trashing the homes of hosts.
[Edit] Southern claims she was originally banned due to public affiliation with certain groups against Airbnb policies and community standards
I think it's objectively clear that she violated that policy, I don't think even she would deny that she engages in discriminatory behavior, bullying and harassment, and disturbing communities. It's not just about speech, she has for example been arrested in Italy for attempting to block migrant rescue operations in the Mediterranean, which directly put lives at risk.
Unless she was doing those things in an AirBNB to other people there, I still find it creepy. These rules have nothing to do with the service. You don't get banned from a regular hotel for any of these reasons.
Looks like he doesn't want Hyatt to host hate group conferences in their hotels, which are events with a lot of publicity where they're clearly using the facilities for promoting hatred. It's not like AirBNB blacklisting an individual from staying the night due to unrelated personal reputation.
Recently a host charged me a cleaning fee, left me a negative review about not cleaning. I requested that the cleaning fee be refunded, since it was clearly fraudulent. AirBnB declined to refund the cleaning fee. I will never use them again.
I wonder what can be done to prevent companies like AirBnB, PayPal from becoming so user-hostile over time.
What can be done is prevent them from becoming near-monopolies with a captured audience.
Cory Doctorow calls this "enshittification" - his term.
The basic idea is that in the beginning, new companies are all about their users, luring them away from competitors, providing the best experience for cheap, with great service. That captures them. Think amazon, underpricing everyone, shipping for free, taking all returns, making a loss for years until everyone just uses amazon to search for products.
Once you have their market, you shift gears, from serving users to serving your financiers, selling the user data/user attention/user experience to them: Amazon selling ranked listings in the search that all the captured customers now use as a default search engine. This makes every seller use amazon to sell. You have to, to reach the captured audience. And you have to pay amazon to be seen.
And finally, using this machine you built, with captured customers and captured sellers to squeeze the most of it. Amazon copying the best-selling items and top-ranking their own products, without of course charging itself fees for either the listing or a cut of the sale, as the do with third parties.
AirBNB don't have a monopoly. Aside from obvious alternatives like hotels, VRBO is quite good and I used it successfully in the past.
I suspect the real reason this happens is a mix of recruiting ex-tech firm employees (they seem to treat abuse as if they were running a social network), and some internal data that shows just one or two bad experiences can cause a host to drop out permanently. There are way fewer hosts than customers, so if one customer repeatedly creates bad experiences then they need an ultra-tough policy as otherwise they'd burn out their supply of hosts too quickly. Hotels don't have this problem because they're much more committed to being hosts, such that a few bad customers occasionally won't cause them to simply shut up shop.
I was traveling and hopping from one city to another in Europe, and when I went to rent my second Airbnb using a perfectly good American credit card, they blocked me for "fraud reasons". I booked a 5* hotel which was even cheaper than the Airbnb apartment and carried on with my trip. I suspect their anti-abuse system bites them pretty often.
I didn't get scammed but did find the service too annoying to want to use it again. Actual price is very different from quoted nightly rate. Can't tell the actual location of the place before I book, wtf. Got to the place and didn't know the combo to get in; isn't that something the booking email should say? Apparently supposed to log into the site again, go to a chat, and contact the host; it's not simply over SMS.
I get that I'm not paying the extra money for a hotel with 24/7 pro staff, but there's gotta be solid automation in place of that. To each their own, I'll just pay for the hotel.
I recently rented a house from booking.com and it was like night & day vs. airbnb. Other than a snafu on the door code (which was resolved in 5m), the place was in a quiet neighborhood, the place was very well appointed (mid-high end everything) and it was roomy. Also not a single thing to do when we left - we pre-paid a cleanup fee included in book price and there was no checkout list other than to text a number saying we had departed.
Left feeling quite impressed, almost like it was a hotel (but better, it was quiet).
I just logged into AirBNB after not using it for a few years (pandemic and all), only to find that my account was deactivated for not following their ToS and community standards. I only ever had great reviews from the places that I stayed, so I figured they just deactivated it because it was stale.
I requested that they reactivate it and got an automated response saying that they deactivated it because of information in my credit report, and until I dispute that information, their decision is final.
I went and pulled all three credit reports to find that I have no negative information in there at all. I have stellar credit, scores in the "very good" to "excellent" range, minimal debt, no collections, great ratios between available credit and current balances, no negative consumer information...so what's there to dispute?
I've asked them to reinstate my account, but as someone who reads HN and knows how these automated systems behave, I have minimal confidence that they'll do anything about it.
I also reported them to the FTC for misusing/abusing consumer credit information, and I encourage anyone who has been swept up in their Kafka-esque universe to do the same.
This is almost definitely not true. I don't particularly like Airbnb but I would be very surprised if most hotels don't use services that do the exact thing described in this article.
Yeah. I feel like sometimes you'd want an apartment to properly experience the city life, if you're into that (I am). And that's basically the only shortcoming of hotels for me, because indeed, they're cheaper in 99% of cases.
There are demographics where I would not want to take the risk of renting out my property to them. In the U.S. we tend to make things about race when it ought to be about class. Yes, I’m biased against certain economic classes of people (not based on race).
> “For example, if someone is removed for a serious safety incident during an Airbnb reservation and we need to remove them and cancel their future reservations, and we then find that someone re-books the exact same future reservation with the same credit card number, we will remove the second account,” the company said.
So I can see how this is absolutely necessary in some cases, but also how there's always going to be a confusing gray area no matter where you draw the line.
It feels particularly crazy because if you travel together with a romantic partner who damages a property, and then you basically have to convince AirBNB that the two of you have broken up, and that the two of you aren't just using your account now to escape the other's ban.