
The “Inside Airbnb” project has earned the home-sharing company bad press - thewhitetulip
https://backchannel.com/a-lone-data-whiz-is-fighting-airbnb-and-winning-7fd49513266e
======
CodeWriter23
There's no excuse for AirBNB permitting listings of multiple dwellings in the
localities that prohibit it. In order to produce the Federally-mandated 1099K,
they have to take the host's SSN and keep it on file. Even if someone uses
multiple accounts, they can simple compare the SSN of an account adding a
listing and reject the listing is the SSN already has a different listing on
file for the locality in question.

~~~
daurnimator
I only gave airbnb my SSN because they were very clear that it would only be
kept for purposes of producing my 1099K. If that changed (maybe it has? I
don't use airbnb any more) then that would be a change of their TOS.

~~~
dastbe
Would you have no/less concern if they encrypted your SSN and used that for
non-1099k related tasks?

~~~
eck
The keyspace of SSNs is only 10^9. I don't think password hashing would help
much.

~~~
nickfrostatx
Okay, so don't associate the SSN hash with the account. Come up with a
mechanism to store anonymized SSNs to detect duplicate accounts.

~~~
im3w1l
Bloomfilters.

------
chx
Here's a single data point:
[https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&check...](https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&checkout=25-03-2017&guests=1&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=j4d9g87T)
I reported this listing to Airbnb more than a year ago and it's still up. As
the review says, it's a shitty motel and if you look at the map
[https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2](https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2) or go
there personally (which I did) you will immediately see it can not be anything
else but a motel because there are no private dwellings at the junction at
all! (There's another room
[https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&check...](https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&checkout=23-02-2017&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=wDMxzxQG)
listed, same thing)

I did a crazy one week trip last January, every day sleeping somewhere else:
Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Beer-Sheva, Avdat - Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat, Petra, Amman,
fly home. I do not drive. I do not read or speak any Semitic language. It was
quite a trip.

~~~
kobayashi
Yikes. Airbnb really needs to deal with abuses such as those. That's just not
fair for customers.

I'm interested about why you mention not speaking any Semitic languages.
English is pretty-well universally understood there - did you have any
problems with language barriers?

~~~
c06n
> English is pretty-well universally understood there

No, this is absolutely not the case. I was there just over Christmas, and we
did have problems to communicate with locals. Sure, the college educated all
speak English. They don't work as bus drivers or at the gas station though.
But these are the people I interact with the most as a tourist.

That is not to say that people aren't multilingual there. I'm sure they all
speak two or three languages. Such as Hebrew, Arabic or Russian.

Israel isn't just Tel Aviv.

~~~
kobayashi
That's a good point. You can get around Tel Aviv while only speaking English,
but perhaps not so much in the north.

------
debt
"data activist"

beginning of a new type of activism right here.

corporations manipulate the data. data activist or journalists are tasked with
teasing out the bullshit in the data itself.

------
jstanley
I find the anti-AirBnB comments on this site quite confusing, because in most
other cases HN seems to be pro-free markets. If a landlord wants to rent their
place out to short-term tenants, and tenants want to rent it, and AirBnB want
to act as a marketplace, I can't see what the harm is.

You don't have any right to say who comes and goes to your neighbours'
properties, any more than they have any right to say who comes and goes to
your property.

If you want to decide who gets to stay in a given house, you should buy that
house. Otherwise it's none of your business.

~~~
CPLX
Of course you have a right to say who comes and goes in your neighbors
properties and what kinds of things they are allowed to do, as I am sure you
would insist were they to open a concert venue or dog fighting arena.

~~~
willholloway
That's an apples to oranges comparison.

A short term rental is residential use, just like a long term rental is
residential use. In both cases the property is used by people to live and
sleep in.

The question is does local government have the right to regulate the duration
of a rental lease?

I would argue it doesn't, and it's a blatant violation of sacred property
rights for a government to take that power.

The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will
keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for violations
of decibel levels after curfew.

There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans
are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days.

~~~
vacri
> _The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will
> keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for
> violations of decibel levels after curfew._

Because as we know, if there's one easy thing to get, it's "pay later" fine
money from tourists. And if there's one thing that really sparks police
springing into action, it's an urban noise complaint.

> _There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans
> are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days._

"$500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew" _is a regulation_
\- what twisted world is it where something involving the word 'curfew' isn't
considered a regulation?

~~~
willholloway
So you are saying we can't enforce our existing regulations, so the answer is
to create new regulations.

I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new,
broad ones.

~~~
vacri
So what are you going to do when tourists can't afford to immediately pay a
$500 on-the-spot fine? Drag them off to jail? Are you really willing to jail
people over a _noise complaint_? Your local Chamber of Commerce is going to
love that.

> _narrowly tailored_ ... _broad_

Obviously enforcement of the existing _broad_ regulations isn't working, so we
should create new _narrowly tailored_ ones instead.

This spin-doctoring stuff is fun!

~~~
willholloway
Thats a nice straw man you created there and then argued against.

Of course we can fine people that live in other jurisdictions as we do with
speeding tickets, and no one is dragged off to jail and fines are not
collected on the spot.

~~~
vacri
Speeding tickets are where the government holds all the information on the
person. Fining a tourist AirBnBer requires getting a warrant to get
information out of a private company. How much effort do you think is going to
go into pursuing a noise complaint? If you're not on-the-spot fining, just how
many resources do you think the police will throw at pursuing that?

Are you aware also that tourists come from outside the country? Speeding
tickets aren't particularly enforceable in that case.

~~~
willholloway
AirBnB has entered into tax collection and information sharning agreements
with State governments. Can we not add a system for sharing information for
legitimate police noise complaints? I think we can.

I would like to see us come up with creative and tech based solutions for
potential problems with vacation rentals, rather than throwing the baby out
with the bathwater.

There are a lot of good coming from vacation rentals, and a lot of people love
them.

I am just very much against the idea that if any new thing inconveniences or
even potentially inconveniences anyone in even a minor way, we should outright
blanket ban it. And that is what the people pushing for punitive bans are
saying.

Find solutions. Penalize bad actors. Don't practice group punishment. Screen
guests with more and better data. Don't just ban the "other"

------
willholloway
My town had a recent dustup over prohibiting AirBnB, some people claimed that
it was against zoning regulations, the town attorney and planning and zoning
looked into it and decided it was beyond their power to regulate tenure, or
the length of a lease.

Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up
the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two
hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor.

Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about
hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios.

My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are
about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with
any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint,
prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against
AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though.

The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive
criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even
check the terrorist watch list!

One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud
parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and
knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned
out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties
when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB.

My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and
we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis.

Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all
kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town.

I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but
it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a
bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really
revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals
to live.

Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and
next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more
desirable place to live.

~~~
dexwiz
Is it a desirable place to live? Or a desirable place to vacation? It sounds
like your town was already a destination if it supports 200 short term
rentals.

~~~
willholloway
The town is highly desirable waterfront community, the region has a bit of a
jobs problem, and the town was in a funk, visitors were down, local businesses
were struggling, all the towns talented young people move off to larger
cities, to places that are fun.

Now this place is fun too, we have a nano-brewery opening up, hipster
restaurants, new boat tours...

The town planner loves AirBnB because it lets the town use some slack housing
supply like guest cottages and in-law suites to host visitors in the downtown
area, where it would be impossible to build a new hotel.

And short term rentals bring in a different kind of visitor than the hotels
ever did. People come and stay for a week with their family.

It's all really nice actually.

And a large majority of AirBnB hosts are women. AirBnB is empowering a lot of
women to become micro real estate entrepreneurs and earn money.

When people support blanket bans, they are cutting off income and opportunity
for people, mostly women.

Punish bad guests, have the police fine them. Towns make money off speeding
and parking tickets, I see no reason they can't make money off the occasional
guest violating a noise ordinance.

------
cletus
Wow. As for the legality of all this, it's really beyond my ken.

Firstly, there's the question of jurisdiction. If a resident of the stste of
New York uses a server outside of NY belonging to a company outside of NY to
rent out an apartment in NYC, does the state of NY have jurisdiction? What
about NYC?

Years ago Amazon took the stance that sales were interstate commerce and they
shouldn't be forced to collect sales tax on interstate transactions. They
ended up caving to New York's so-called "Amazon tax" [1].

Airbnb seems to be taking the view that it's not their problem if individuals
violate NY/NYC law. Personally I think that's purely a self-serving stance a
bit like how Craigslist turned a blind eye to prostitution.

I believe that illegal hotels in a few cities are Airbnb's core business and
the efforts of cities to enforce laws prohibiting such are an existential
threat. I believe Airbnb knows this.

I also believe that Airbnb will ultimately lose this one.

What this PDF represents is at best misleading and data manipulation and at
worse misrepresentation. If at some point Airbnb has or will respond under
oath or to a subpoena with this information well that could be a crime.

Whatever the case I think this is going to take years to play out.

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-
sal...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sales-
tax.html)

------
stuaxo
Sounds like the earned their own bad press.

------
Overtonwindow
Inaccurate title.

------
mydpy
He's not alone. The article talks about the importance of his collaborator
Slee. Weird, click-baitey article title.

~~~
dang
Ok, we replaced the title with the subtitle (shortened to fit).

~~~
mydpy
Sorry, I was criticizing the referenced article not your title on HN.

~~~
dang
Oh no problem—the HN guidelines call for changing titles in that case
([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)),
so the observation was relevant here too.

------
xkrackerx
Sifting through data looking for the unseen is one thing but this has got to
be the biggest waste of time ever. AirBnB giving people a place to sleep. Yes,
strangers in your apartment building..like you know your neighbors anyway.

~~~
Neliquat
I lived next to a popular airbnb rental. The lack of neighborly respect,
trash, and noise are not imagined problems. At this point cops now cruise my
rural dirt road once a day just because of it. Commercial activity in a
residential area is a serious problem.

~~~
random_rr
I just purchased a home next to an AirBnB house - it's a mixed bag - well,
it's pretty much all downsides.

More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - check

Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - check

Trash cans are never brought back from the street - check

Yard care - non existent Socialization - zero

There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this
as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's
pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the
neighborhood (I don't blame them).

This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much
crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people
only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the
community.

~~~
ci5er
> when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate
> in the community.

I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so
years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run
into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do
with "community"?

EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and
somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of
his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating
with him about office politics.

Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People
kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any
inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street
address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?

~~~
coredog64
Not really. I only know one neighbor, and only that because he is such an
asshole. A large chunk of homes on my block are rentals, with a constant flow
of new tenants.

