Airbnb Has a Hidden-Camera Problem (2019)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Businesses don't systematically change in response to a few customer complaints (they just sloppily deal with them), but they do respond to large fines and legal action.
If you want to shower in a place, but have to find the hidden cameras prior to taking your shower? I think that's a pretty good sign that you probably shouldn't be showering in that place.
An unlicensed operator running an operation alone from their literal living room doesn't have as much to lose. They might also not think ahead as much, since there is a lot less friction from idea to your first guest.
[1] I don't have stats in hidden cameras in hotels, though, but I would bet that hidden cameras are possible but not likely. At least for "decent" ones.
If they're battery powered and record to internal memory then you'd probably need to spot them directly.
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/20/spy-tech-nonlinear-junction-...
the math/physics behind how this works is fascinating, however, NLJDs are expensive, slow and require specialized electronics skills that the average person doesnt have. NLJD is what Military/Intelligence use to sweep a room for bugs.
but at end of the day, it's an arms race where the only way to win is not to play. if it became easy to detect circuits hidden in the walls or in household objects, they can just escalate to tactics like when the KGB used special screws in the beams of the US embassy in Moscow to record ambient audio of the keys pressed on teletypes to recover the messages. then there's the viral video from a few year back demonstrating recovering audio inside a room with a camera aimed through a glass window pane at a foil bag of chips. the same techniques that recover audio also work for video. it's just a signal to reconstruct.
> In January, Bigham discovered cameras in his rental that he says were never disclosed. After he reached out to the Trust & Safety team, representatives told him he and his family had in fact consented to the cameras because they were visibly displayed in photos on the listing. After Bigham’s blog post on the ordeal went viral, Airbnb apologized and refunded his money.
This kind of behavior is often explained by excuses like incompetence, human error or poor training. There are 2 possible outcomes:
1) It's an obvious lie and tells you everything you need to know about the company, but somehow people keep swallowing it instead of calling BS.
2) It's the true reason but highlights the fact that serious incidents like these are delegated to people with insufficient training because the company doesn't consider the problem serious enough to invest in proper training.
Either option doesn't look good. This is not limited to Airbnb by the way; here are some past examples from other VC-funded companies:
Kitsplit's mis-sold insurance doesn't actually protect against stolen gear, fobs the person off but then does the obvious damage control and pretends to care when the story blew up (no fucks given about the impact on the people until their own reputation becomes at risk): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276631
Wag "dog walking as a service" startup that tries to silence a killed dog's owners with an NDA, again no concerns for the wellbeing of the owners, only concern about their own reputation: https://www.facebook.com/nick.moore.7140/posts/3600186133211
Wag again, realizing that their entire business model is broken, introduces predatory fees to stay afloat that might not even be enforceable in court: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20854100
I could find many more examples (even from companies I unfortunately worked for in the past - because yes, as a lot of people here I used to be drinking the startup koolaid and was part of the problem too) but I think it's enough to show a clear pattern here - these companies could not care less about the negative externalities of their business or actions on society at large.
Stop investing in nakedly criminal schemes.
No one is forcing these people to work for and enable this toxic company.
If you are an engineering manager who is telling your product management and sales folks that you're going to miss the end-of-year contract bonanza because you're going to take the time necessary to get metrics and monitoring, tests, and validation in place to meet an acceptable quality bar, gods help you. You'll be dinged hard for "missing critical deadlines" and promptly replaced with someone who will abuse the team's work/life balance and screw over customers.
But then the new manager will be blamed for burned-out engineers leaving the team and customers raging because of the abuse the company heaps on them.
It's a ruthless cyclical no-win situation that speaks to the need for organized labor in tech.
Literally everything the service does is a negative externality
One of the things we did was a survey of N=226 AirBnB users. 86 people said that they manually searched for devices in AirBnBs, and 8 actually found undisclosed devices. As you might imagine, manually searching is hard because devices are small, but also because you don't always know if you've found everything, and because it looks socially awkward too.
People also reported on how they looked for devices, ranging from manual search (most common) to using WiFi / Bluetooth scanning tools. Here is an excerpt from our paper as to what people said they did.
11 (13%) tech-savvy participants used special tools to help search, such as using a phone camera or flashlight, scanning Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi network, and using an infrared scanner. For example, participants reported that they turned off all the lights and used their smartphone flashlight to shine around the area and look for reflections that might indicate a camera lens. Some participants reported that their smartphone cameras did not have an infrared filter, and so they could detect invisible infrared light emitted by cameras. Other participants reported using smartphone apps, such as Fing and iNet, to detect suspicious devices connecting to the network. Two participants brought RF signal detectors to scan the room for the source of RF signals (cameras). However, these methods require a strong technical background, and the devices might not be cheap (e.g., over $100 USD on Amazon for a popular RF signal detector).
The main point of the paper, though, is to look at ways for IoT device manufacturers to help physically locate devices. We called these IoT Locators. An example might be to have devices blink or beep. It's trying to address the physical layer of privacy, to help people have more awareness of what's nearby and where these devices are. The logical layer might tell you that there's a camera nearby, but we also wanted to help people find those devices and see (for example) where those cameras might be pointed. There's a big difference between a camera in an AirBnb that is pointed toward the living room versus pointed out the window, something that isn't captured just by knowing that a camera is nearby.
There's lots of limitations, for example needing lots of standards among device manufacturers and how to incentivize them to install things like these in devices. I would say the main idea, though, is that we need to really think more about the physical dimensions of privacy (which has been underlooked in research and industry), and that we need to think more about how to help hotels, AirBnBs, and device manufacturers that do want to do better on privacy w.r.t devices, but don't know what to do.
Solution: Curtains. As in, room-filling curtains, so people can do private things in an Air-b'n-box.
(I'm obviously not interested in unethical spying, but could be fun to play with)
Just be aware that security is never guaranteed and they’ve had some issues in the past.
Gee I wonder why the police response was not kind to him
Making hosts civilly liability for these hidden cameras, unless they can demonstrate they’ve taken proper steps to ensure safety, would motivate this change. Of course hosts will won’t like it, but it’s not as if these people are going to stop renting out their rooms; it’s too financially lucrative.
I suspect the problem isn't with the cameras, but with landlords they can't control - and that interfere with AirBnb's bottom line.
AirBnB's are more affected though, as the penalty might just be a warning/fine/bad review affecting a single property. At a hotel, the entire hotel of X rooms would be affected by the bad publicity, so they have more at stake.
Yes, they’re price sensitive, but if Airbnb carried a “you will be recorded while you sleep” disclaimer I doubt many would agree.
Many tenants have problems with adverse selection; more robust monitoring systems would allow for them to take on more risky tenants, without seeing their property trashed.