> They refused to give data to the attorney general, and instead, mounted an AD campaign.
Companies that take their customer's privacy seriously should be lauded, not condemned.
Companies that take their customer's privacy seriously should be lauded, not condemned.
You can claim "users rights" all you want, but knowing people are using your service to break laws, and just refusing compliance, well gets you to exactly the position they are in.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023034803045795759...
That wouldn't convince me that Google should turn over thousands of user records without a fight.
It's important that prosecutors have some sort of burden or proof before obtaining personal information, not after. I hope all companies push back on such requests, even when it's not in their financial interest to do so.
Google is an index of the web, and allows folks to search that index.
Google has a process to remove search results that would links to sites that host copyright material.
We're not talking about protecting a political activist. We're talking about illegal rentals.
Whatever negligible externalities are introduced by Airbnb, they are vastly outweighed by positive effects like making travel more affordable and busting up the hotel oligopoly.
I felt compelled to point how ridiculous this is. There are tons of lodging options. You can see for yourself with a casual search on any price comparison site.
I travel quite a bit for work, and I've stayed at 30+ hotels over the last 2 years. All of them, with the exception of a couple independents in NYC, were owned by Marriott or IHG.
But regardless, if an attorney general asked The Pirate Bay or Mega for all personally identifying user data, I imagine people would be singing a different tune. Or, similarly, if an attorney general asked Google for everyone who had searched for "piratebay" or "mega".
> The legal strike comes just days after AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky tried to appease state lawmakers by agreeing that its users should collect the normal hotel occupancy tax and promising to work with pols to root out bad hosts.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/state-airbnb-articl...
The appropriate summary is: AG specifically wants information about people who actually owe hotel occupancy taxes. They aren't trolling for every AirBnB user.
The difference compared to your hypothetical examples is that merely visiting the sites doesn't necessarily constitute illegal behavior. Searching for "mega" in and of itself is not an illegal activity, just like how searching for "marijuana" is not illegal (especially now that certain states have legalized recreational use). The true analogy is asking the torrent trackers to release IP information for connections pertaining to a specific torrent.
AirBnB didn't want to solve this problem, so NY solved it without AirBnB's help. It's a predictable outcome, and one that AirBnB was hurtling towards once they stood in the path of any other solution.
But eBay profits from people selling stolen goods.
A telco profits when people conspire to commit crimes via email or phone.
A pharmaceutical company profits when an addict buys drugs under a fake prescription.
But the companies aren't specifically commit a crime just because those things happened and the company received income from it.
Companies are expected to do take reasonable steps to limit those sorts of activities, and to appropriately assist law enforcement when they seek to investigate or curb such occurrences.
Surely if there were landlords renting out entire apartment buildings then the sequential addresses would show up in AirBnB's data as mystreet 1a, mystreet 1b, mystreet 1c and so on? It must have been pretty obvious to the point that a routine check against illegal activity should have carried out.
Depends on whether the activity they're engaging is legal or not.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11116426/airbnb-report-dat...