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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

This is basically like an open house. They should have prepped the house the same way before taking these photos.

The high tech part seems not really related. The same thing would have happened with plain photos, or an in person open house.

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They should've but the tech part is relevant. Obvious bad actors that are snooping around in open houses are certainly an issue but can be remediated a lot easier - you can kick those visitors out and bar folks with a history of snooping from entry - both of which work relatively well on the local level.

I think tech is specifically relevant here since this is another clear example of scaling up beyond cultural norms using technology causing emergent security issues - the issues were present all along but there were some systems in place to limit how harmful they could be and technology has released us from those limits.

Typically in an open house just anybody can walk in, can’t they? It’s not like they ask you for ID.

It isn't a public space so you can be barred from entry and, often, you'll be let into the house by a realtor. If that realtor recognizes you as abusing open houses they can just refuse you entry or take a more extreme measure.

I'm not sure that I would trust a realtor to recognize war driving (war showing?).

Realtors are there to sell houses. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of them had a keen “nose” to figure out who is just “interested” and who means real business. After all it is in their best interest to not waste their time with lookie-loos.

Obviously that doesn’t mean that one can’t pretend well enough once or twice, but not at a scale where this becomes a viable avenue to criminals.

Having bought a house, I sure would be surprised. And IME if they don't think you look like you're gonna buy the house, they just let you walk around but ignore you.

From a house selling perspective it's probably in their best interest to simply ignore those people. Buyers with large pockets can come of as lackadaisical.

It also seems like it's not worth a confrontation trying to stop people from coming in, from the agent's perspective.

Yeah, very little gain, and a good chance to end up on social media branded as a racist or classist.

Your speculation is contradicted by thousands of open houses every weekend.

Seriously, go visit one and see what it's like. It's not the CIA Headquarters, it's usually a minimums wage newbie agent squatting in a house advertising for clients.

I've seen realtors ask for ID unless you're accompanied by another realtor (who would leave a card). Basically they want a record of people through the house in case something does happen. You could easily make a fake business card, of course... professional courtesy means a realtor seldom asks another for an id. But this would likely only work briefly in a given area once word got out.

I bought a house before and attended a number of open houses. I signed my name on a sheet but was not asked to present ID. In some cases (I guess where the realtor figured I wasn't going to buy? Not sure) they just let me walk around and paid no attention to me at all.

That isn't how an open house works (at least in my experience buying a house in Los Angeles in 2018). They advertise the hours, put up a bunch of balloons, and anyone can walk in. They ask you to sign a sheet so they can contact you, but I never saw them make anyone sign it or request an ID. I visited maybe 30-50 houses doing open houses, and a good half of those weren't with our realtor (or they arrived well after we did).

I went to 50+ open houses in the 3 years pre-Covid (finally bought a place just before it started) and was never once asked for ID. They usually ask you to write down contact info on a sheet, which I do using intentionally impossible-to-read handwriting to avoid follow-up spam.

Three years? Now I’m afraid to ever sell my house.

I bought my house in a raging micro bubble in the Bay Area and got the first one I made an offer on. Really just depends how much you care about getting a good deal. I did some math and figured it wasn’t worth the effort.

There's a lot of stuff that looks better online than in real life ;)

And we took quite a while to figure out what we really wanted (and we were comfortable living in the place we were in, so we didn't need to make a change...)

We only ever made three offers, two of them on places we saw on the same day.

> scaling up beyond cultural norms

This is a great way of framing a certain class of problems that I think people on HN tend to dismiss. "Technically we're doing the same thing as before!" Yes, but as we should all know from the engineering side of things, scale is still very relevant.

It's exactly the same as when they used to take internal photos of properties, only you can zoom and move around now in better detail.

When we had ours done last year, I treated it the same as when we had the internal photos done - tidy everything up, put identifiable documents away, strategically place items over the logos/names of things.

I did notice that when we went to view some properties in person, that there were personal items out on display - but the photos online were clear of anything - so it's more down to the homeowner than anyone else.

The guide we got before any photos etc clearly stated to put away anything you didn't want others to see, both for in person and for online.

"The BBC has alerted the Information Commissioner's Office." - I'm not sure why? If the homeowner missed it, and didn't follow instructions to remove before the photos, then I'm not sure that it is the fault of the agent at all.

Edit - This is from the guide we got sent after a call discussing the same things:

- The entirety of your home will be captured by the tour, and every detail will be picked up – so remove anything you don’t want seen, i.e., family photographs, clutter or boxes - Don’t leave pictures, portraits or drawings up that you don’t wish to be photographed (typically, portrait images where the person would be recognisable) - Don’t leave valuables and possessions in sight which you don’t want others to see - Please note: The technology does not allow for edits or retakes, so please ensure your home is exactly how you want it to be seen!

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