Look at it from the other side of things: how would you react if AirBnB weren't doing these checks?
If I'm staying somewhere, I'm leaving my luggage, and there's plenty of opportunities for stuff to go missing, whether in the middle night or otherwise.
That's just the petty crime aspect, leaving aside other opportunities for much more serious badness.
It's bad that their customer service failed you, but I'd much rather there was a tiny bit of hassle for people renting out apartments for the safety of those staying there.
Heaven forbid they spend 10 dollars on a php upload script on SSL for this kind of information as opposed to "Scan you social security card and send it to customerservice@airbnb.com!"
Pedantic note: I'm not excusing them for lacking something as critical as a secure way to transmit sensitive information, but it's certainly more involved than "ten dollars worth of PHP."
You're probably looking at setting up a dedicated server to store the images (since you want the server locked down tighter than a normal web server, and you need to think about having different backups in place, etc) and then have one of the engineers spend a few days developing a system to upload the images and allow secured access to their support staff. Sure, writing the code to upload files is easy, but the security and UI take a good bit of effort. You're probably looking closer to $1k excluding the cost of hardware and the SSL cert.
I have a feeling the OP couldn't care less whether AirBnB were doing those checks. The OP knows he lives there, he doesn't need someone to verify that.
If I'm staying somewhere, I'm leaving my luggage, and there's plenty of opportunities for stuff to go missing, whether in the middle night or otherwise.
That's just the petty crime aspect, leaving aside other opportunities for much more serious badness.
It's bad that their customer service failed you, but I'd much rather there was a tiny bit of hassle for people renting out apartments for the safety of those staying there.