I would assume this is easily accomplished with minimal ai. The obvious demographic to target would include young adults, college students, urban dwellers, individuals with outgoing personalities, those who enjoy socializing, and people within certain professions like event planning or entertainment.
The psychographic target is also not some mystery advanced ai has to unravel… Individuals who relish social settings, finding joy in connections with others, often possess an adventurous spirit, embracing novelty and pursuing thrills. Typically extroverted, they thrive amidst lively atmospheres, delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly found at gatherings. Prioritizing fun and relaxation, these individuals treasure parties as opportunities to unwind and savor life's pleasures. Some among them exhibit a willingness to take risks, drawn to experiences that provide an adrenaline rush and a sense of adventure.
With all this said, airbnb is literally attacking the majority of the user base that made airbnb what it is. Sounds like airbnb may need to rebrand to Auntie BnB and start charging micro-transactions for small thrills once their user base is thoroughly oppressed.
So all we need is all personal information of everyone and then judging people based on personal attributes by some inscrutable system which may or may not be fair and can't be examined and (most likely) will be difficult to correct?
> delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly
Genuine question, but how will Airbnb know this about you? Are you suggesting they've bought some 3rd party dataset that contains this information about its customers, or is somehow inferring these precise personality interests by looking at a customer's prior bookings?
I'm aware Airbnb lets you book 'experiences', which could be used to infer personality, but I'm not sure how popular these actually are (as an extrovert with extroverted friends in their lates 20s/early 30s I don't know anyone that has booked any).
I think it's possibly much simpler than we think - they can probably just look at your average booking size by number of guests (to determine how likely you frequently party), the type of property/location you've booked, and how close to NYE you've made the booking (a last minute NYE booking with 13 guests screams party).
True, for starters their visible customer insight stack includes Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Looker, Amplitude, Customer io, heap analytics and other tools to gather, analyze, and derive insights from user data and behaviors. 3rd party tooling provides the third party data in this case.
Is this a chatgpt rendition of what a person who likes parties supposed to be? I can't tell if the joke is the separating of yourself from the party goers or how clinically detached it is
What is obvious is how many people choose to discredit every post I make on this platform with the strategy of a grade school bully.
I have always been a party throwing animal. This clinical detachment you speak of is a human that realizes how detached clinical assessments actually are.
> I would assume this is easily accomplished with minimal ai. The obvious demographic to target would include young adults, college students, urban dwellers, individuals with outgoing personalities, those who enjoy socializing, and people within certain professions like event planning or entertainment.
That would be profiling. Instead, we have an ethical AI. :)
> The technology looks at hundreds of signals that could indicate a booking is higher risk for this type of incident, like the duration of the trip the guest is trying to book, how far the listing is from their location, the type of listing they’re booking, and if the reservation is being made at the last-minute, among many more.
This is most likely a (simple) ML model trained on previous reports of such bookings.
Not newsworthy, but probably not a bunch of if-statements.
I'm betting it probably doesn't even exist or if does won't be implemented. Imagine the lawsuits from people who will be rejected? No, as someone mentioned above, it's pure PR to hop on the hype train, à la Q* a few weeks back
> Airbnb brought in anti-party measures last NYE that saw thousands of people globally blocked from booking an entire home listing on the platform, including approximately 63,550 people in the United States, 13,200 in the UK, and 5,400 in Australia.
Generally speaking, unless you're in the EU, you won't be successful in suing a company that blocks you and doesn't provide a reason.
I guess if you follow a rule-based system, with hard-coded rules, you are explicitly discriminating someone. How you came up with those rules, is another discussion - it could very well be that there's some legit reason for coming up with rules, that justifies them. I honestly don't know how these discrimination laws work in the US, or many other countries.
On the other hand, if you build some model/classifier, and say:
Given data/features, and some constraints, minimize/maximize for probability of partying.
Then that black-box model could be used to classify whether a potential renter is likely/at risk to host a party or not.
You're not explicitly saying "NO PEOPLE OF CERTAIN SKIN COLOR OR GENDER UNDER A CERTAIN AGE ALOWED", but rather your classifier is doing it for you, without stating it plainly - because maybe the above group happens to get classified a lot to the "party" group/class. Such models could have a lot of bias.
Oh, yes, I've fallen afoul of that a few years ago. A booking for one adult (not in the stereotypical partygoer age range) and one child (definitely not in that age range) and of course Airbnb decided that it was a party and there was no way to appeal.
Welcome to minority report where machines guess your intentions and block you in real life. It was bad enough online.
The attestation is fine but blocking?
I wonder if can be used to do other stuff, like ML models that distribute the guests in certain ways to increase the chance of certain people meet in order to boost or suppress political movements. Maybe block or overprice individuals likely to engage in environmental activities in sponsorship with the oil companies? Maybe arrange pricing and availability in certain way to demoralize people from certain ideologies so it's more likely they have less energy and money to their thing.
Airbnb needs to be blocked all together in the EU. I lost track of how many cities pushed people out and became unaffordable to the locals, because the rentals went to Airbnbs and tourists.
Housing should be for shelter of the people who live, work and study there, not for tourists, they have registered hotels, motels, inns, etc dedicated just for that.
Also, by and large, they're just awful — Airbnb's across Europe is a game of chance if it's actually a nice flat or if it was someone who has divide a regular-sized residence into 3 very small rooms with plasterboard dividers.
I opt for hotels as much as I possibly can, but when travelling with a group or family, hotels are perceived as "anti-social," which I think is really the only thing keeping Airbnb alive at this stage — the social norms.
Apartment rentals on booking.com/hotels.com is, at least, a bit closer to what I want — but most are still tailored around the long-stay/corporate travellers... Airbnb does fill that niche well.
It was very nice originally, when they sold themselves (at least in the EU) as a way to stay "at home", even share some time and meet the locals renting you their room, all for a fraction of what a hotel costs.
But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.
Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
Also, while they save all the expenses on staff, meaning, gradually destroying hotel staff jobs, too.
Airbnb: all the price of a regular hotel without the staff or attention.
>Airbnb should be back to what it was at the beginning, a way to rent a room in your own house
Every app that starts with the idea of renting "just a room", quickly turns into an unofficial mass market rental scheme by the users. Same how every app that starts with the idea of traveling, socializing and meeting new people, eventually gets turned into an unofficial dating and hookup app by its users.
You'd probably think differently if you and your family would be pushed out of the housing market by wealthier foreigners.
Every free market has a lot of asterixis and contingencies to prevent exploitations and imbalances, such as the introduction of tariffs.
It's a free market if you and me living and working in the same country are competing for the same real estate. But if much wealthier foreigners from a country where the average salary is 5x higher or private equity firms can come and easily swoop up that real estate from us, it's no longer free market, it's just economic colonialism.
The problem with the current free market is that it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer, meaning it's no longer people competing with other people for assets, but piles of money competing against other international piles of money, and the bigger piles are winning.
All this just leads to the ever increasing wealth inequality.
The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory), but works very poorly at doing the same for life necessities like housing where costs keep going up as they're treated as investment vehicles not as commodities.
Well, I do think differently and I believe that Capitalism is pushing humans to the brink of destruction as it provides a strong incentive for people/corporations to exploit resources as fast as possible.
The Airbnb problem highlights that free markets shouldn't be applied everywhere as there's often important considerations that go beyond just making someone some money.
> The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory)
I know that's the general belief of free markets, but in reality the size of businesses counts far more than their efficiency or quality. Arguably, we don't have free markets as that would entail people having sufficient knowledge about the products/services and that just doesn't happen as the people with the most money can easily influence people (e.g. marketing, advertising, buying news services etc).
>Well, I do think differently and I believe that Capitalism is pushing humans to the brink of destruction as it provides a strong incentive for people/corporations to exploit resources as fast as possible.
It's not really differently in any way, I'm on the same page as you.
Capitalism is mostly driven by greed to amass more wealth, and real estate is a finite form of wealth.
More laws are not a solution. And i definitely don't want more EU non-voted-for-commissariat interventions.
(similar shit w/ 'fraud preventention', just because you happen to SEPA something to a neighboring country. While having to use your banks' newly-fancy new 'app' -no ther means left possible- to authorize said payment!)
Hmm, you seem to be well versed on the problems with over regulation but maybe AirBnB should push you towards stays with poor sanitary conditions so you can appreciate the benefits of regulations better. Part of the well rounded citizen program of course, first stop parties then stop the other troublemakers. How do you feel about that?
Parties are not the problem. Damages, illegality and annoying the neighbours are what they should be trying to detect. It's a shame that people planning a small get together with friends should have to suffer because some idiots like to trash places.
Many, but I wouldn't say most. There are a few generally quiet areas here where I wouldn't expect loud NYE parties, but there are houses taken over for AirBnB use (one of which is near me, and he needs to get his lock-box fixed, I've been asked about it a few times which begs another question: why do AirBnB renters think a random local walking by will be able to help them get in?!).
Probably because there’s no dedicated front desk and any random person could be the host is my guess?
I don’t know. I prefer my accommodations with a front desk, if only because I tend to check in at odd hours and it’s nice having a human available to help if there are issues.
By comparison AirBnB seems like those annoying customer service “AIs” who are always eager to let you know how much you can get accomplished on the company’s website.
It could be that they are hoping that I know the owner, assuming the owner is local (often the houses specifically setup as short-term lets are not owned by someone local though, local to the city maybe but not the street), which I can understand.
But on more than one occasion I've got a strong “you can't just leave us out here with no clue!” vibe which really makes me wonder just what else they expect me to do!
I thought about that but decided that the issue is a function of location. A cabin in the middle of nowhere is not the same as a busy block in the city. So I really didnt see the need to ban everywhere, only in certain locations. You could even rent the "party zones" at a premium that I am sure some would be willing to pay
> Article 22(1) of the UK GDPR limits the circumstances in which you can make solely automated decisions, including those based on profiling, that have a legal or similarly significant effect on individuals.
"legal or similarly significant effect on individuals" includes discrimination based on any protected characteristics.
AirBnB in any defence will have to prove that race, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc were _not_ part of any automated decision.
As the article mentions that this is being deployed to the UK I have cited a UK specific article.
I'm wondering how I could figure out that I was the victim of this. Perhaps if the booking was cancelled almost immediately after being booked.
Wouldn't the workaround for airbnb to be having a member of staff 'approve' the decision (where the member of staff has thousands to approve a day,and understands that their job is to just click approve all the time).
GDPR enforcement is severely lacking, not only in the UK but even in Europe even in case of blatant and obvious breaches (Facebook, Google, etc), so good luck getting the regulator to do anything about your "Your booking couldn't be processed, please try again later" error.
Just wait until this is deployed against people with the “wrong” political, religious, etc beliefs and tuned in a way that legally skirts the 1st Amendment.
Update: For the down-voters, my wife was banned from Airbnb for being from the “wrong” country despite her being a naturalized US citizen.
FB, Twitter, and other sites have been suppressing links and keywords for years.
Certain political and medical positions have received active suppression on these platforms which are then defended as misinformation only to be shown accurate years later.
I'm not sure why you think that. The input data is clearly quite high-dimensional. Unless you work there, it seems rather arrogant to suppose that you could replace someone's hard work with "a few if statements". Unless you meant learning a decision tree classifier from the data?
The psychographic target is also not some mystery advanced ai has to unravel… Individuals who relish social settings, finding joy in connections with others, often possess an adventurous spirit, embracing novelty and pursuing thrills. Typically extroverted, they thrive amidst lively atmospheres, delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly found at gatherings. Prioritizing fun and relaxation, these individuals treasure parties as opportunities to unwind and savor life's pleasures. Some among them exhibit a willingness to take risks, drawn to experiences that provide an adrenaline rush and a sense of adventure.
With all this said, airbnb is literally attacking the majority of the user base that made airbnb what it is. Sounds like airbnb may need to rebrand to Auntie BnB and start charging micro-transactions for small thrills once their user base is thoroughly oppressed.