> I learned recently that Airbnb (YC W09) actually sells your chat logs[2] and stay history(!) to data brokers, which can be used for stalking or kidnapping in the wrong hands.
That's a pretty big misrepresentation of the NY Times article. From the article:
> Sift doesn’t sell or share any of the data it has with third parties.
Sift is a third party risk analysis provider. One of its big selling points is that it can correlate fraud signals across multiple data sets. So, essentially, companies that DON'T want to share data with each other can share data with sift and rely on it to provide aggregate results back. In this way it's the opposite of a data broker. Companies trust it to hold sensitive data they don't want to share.
There are a lot of reasons why any centralized fraud prevention service is concerning and I know that many companies, including Airbnb, limit their use of these signals for that reason. Truthfully, I think the dangers of such a service far outweigh their value and it simply shouldn't exist at all.
Regardless, it's quite different than selling your data to a data broker. If there were any indication that Sift were selling or sharing this data I guarantee they would get dropped instantly. If you believe that a company can't really care about its users' privacy (and you might be justified in that) just consider that sharing this data would be the same as sharing it with the fraudsters it ostensibly tries to stop. That would defeat the entire point of the service.
To a sibling poster, the premise of the NYT article is that Sift allowed end users to download their own data because of GDPR not in violation of it.
There are often threads on here criticizing Airbnb for allowing fraud on the platform and saying they do nothing to prevent it. Here we're criticizing them for sharing data with a centralized fraud system to gain signal on potential fraud.
I think this is the crux of the discussion about the surveillance state vs "defund the police". Algorithmic fraud detection is a frequently racist invasion of privacy. But fraud and crime are also both bad and tend to have a more significant impact on a company's brand / reputation than overreaching in terms of data collection and surveillance. So it's very important to hold them accountable for their use of data but let's not muddy the argument by misrepresenting what's happening.