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Comment by karzeem | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of revealing some intrinsic immorality or something, I don't really see what's wrong with this. It would be wrong of the sales team to claim to have used Airbnb for stays that never happened, or to invent false testimonials, but that's not the charge.

The allegation is that they emailed property owners and said, effectively, "Airbnb is great, you should use it" without saying how or why they came to hold that opinion. It's untruthful in the sense of not including the whole truth, but I'd put it decisively under naughty, not blackhat.

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They 'illegally' spammed users for at least a year.

> It never fails that I get at least 20 marketing emails a day from airbnb when I post a property on craigslist. I hope they do more of these PR stunts than filling up my inbox with unsolicited messages. [0]

"I'm not a lawyer but I am an anti-spam expert.

They most certainly are illegal. They are unsolicited advertising (which is fine under CAN-SPAM, sadly), and contain none of the requirements of CAN-SPAM - a legitimate business address, and a clear unsubscribe link.

Just because they come from gmail accounts does not exempt AirBnB from the law." [1]

[0] http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605565

I don't know enough to have an opinion about whether it's illegal, but even assuming it is, that doesn't mean it's immoral.

Immoral: not conforming to the patterns of conduct usually accepted or established as consistent with principles of personal and social ethics.

Typically, what is ethical is respecting the user wishes. If I say, "Don't contact me for commercial interest" (the checkbox when you post something on Craigslist) and you do so, I would say that doesn't conform to business ethics.

I'm not saying this was a good thing for AirBNB to do, but is violating the sanctity of the craigslist commercial checkbox the worst AirBNB has done? Sure, that's not a respectable way to do business, but we're not exactly talking about Enron or Bernie Madoff here.

The only reason anyone posts anything on Craigslist is to get emails for commercial interests. That's what classified ads are for. Because everyone posting apartments for rent is by definition looking to rent their apartment, I think it's well targeted enough that AirBnB would get a pass on cold emailing people if they were doing it in an ethical and upstanding way. It sounds like they weren't, but if they were then the 'one bite at the apple' law would be the governing ethical principle. (Of course the design of Craigslist makes following this rule impossible, but that's a separate issue.)

Surprising downvotes. I wouldn't have thought that the HN hivemind feels that something illegal is ipso facto immoral.

And just because something is legal, doesn't make it immoral. The law doesn't touch anything but the worst of the worst of spam.

To address your other post, I would assume that you're getting down-voted because you're playing devil's advocate by presenting that argument in a discussion of something that almost all of us would agree is immoral, regardless of legality.

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