Comment by crazygringo
3 years ago
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.
Source: work in Trust and Safety (not at Airbnb).
> 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.
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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.
See, PageRank isn't dead - it's just used on people now
“Very polarizing” is one way to put it, considering she’s been banned from entering the UK.
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.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-43393035
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.
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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.
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That goes both ways. Many right wing states are currently trying to ban drag shows.
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How is this any different than with a hotel?
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.
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> 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.
> reasonably competent human
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.
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A hotel ban only applies to one hotel or to a chain, not every hotel. Airbnb have a monopoly.
A quick search for "airbnb alternatives" shows this isn't quite true. They're just by far the major player.
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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.
What is Airbnb supposed to have a monopoly on? Their own trademark?
A monopoly on overnight rentals?
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How does AirBNB track the romantic relationship status of every single one of it's customers?
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.