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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

Any of Airbnb's competitors are going to use this to their advantage. Rightfully so too... I didn't even know about Roomorama until this story.

The biggest part of the story though was thrown in at the end:

The harrowing story of the Airbnb user EJ prompted Ms. En Teo to reach out to her competitors in order to set a precedent for sharing information about sketchy users, so if she gets a report about misbehavior she can send an alert to get him or her banned from other sites. Incidents like this hurt the entire market as well as individual users, she said.

Some kind of data sharing would be a great thing for this industry as they are all vulnerable to the same problems (theft, etc...).

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Careful with that type of data sharing. It can fail the game theory test. Lets say I'm a selfishly amoral actor in the room rental industry, and I want to lock up the market for myself. I can silence all my competition by releasing blacklist information on a number of current users, then those users will be banned by other sites and forced to continue using my site.

Banks do this today with their info sharing through ChexSystems. I've seen banks that will report their current account holders for the most trivial violations. The result being that the account holder can't open an account anywhere else.

ChexSystems is pure evil.

They have to be careful, though, as this kind of thing can be considered libel or slander if not 100% true, and collusion even if it is true. Having an industry-wide blacklist will almost definitely run afoul of the law.

Bars do this all the time in areas where there are problems - they scan your ID and then share the information with other bars, particularly if you get booted.

In the United States, if you make a good faith claim about someone, it's pretty hard to win a libel suit, and, I suspect, it would be even harder to claim that grading an individual rises to the level of slander/libel, particularly if you provide a mechanism to challenge the claims.

If this were not the cases, then credit rating agencies would have a difficult time existing.

the sites just have to remember to put that sign "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone" and they are covered.

Put up that sign and then refuse service to blacks, and you're not fine.

Put up that sign, implement the described policy, receive disproportionate numbers of complaints about blacks (because landlords are racist?), enforce the described policy equally irrespective of race, and you are walking a fine line. You could be sued for that and might not be fine.

the point of the comment i was first replying to was that 'it always worked for brick and mortar shops'

here in LA it's impossible to walk into a bar or restaurant and not see that sign.

but yes, i see your point too.

While your general point still stands, I don't think the existence of credit rating agencies proves much. Even if they would otherwise have been liable, there fundamental utility would, I'm sure, have led to specific legal exemptions.

As it stands, the operation of such agencies is subject to a lot of specific regulation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_bureau#United_States

Even better example; Casino's - I know people barred in pretty much every UK Casino, because they share the info.

I think as long as they follow something similar to the guidelines in [1] they will be fine -- having good reputation information is too valuable to make illegal.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Credit_Reporting_Act

Internet attorneys seem to love turning libel laws into this blanket prohibition on ever saying anything negative about someone or something that is not "100% true" and verifiable.

This doesn't even touch libel laws, and it certainly wouldn't be a _group_ culpability if there's one purveyor out there intentionally spreading malicious lies about some private person.

Landlords do this routinely. The last time I signed a new housing lease, part of the lease agreement was an agreement to allow the state association of landlords to share data about my history as a renter. Since I have a clean history, no problem. If I'm ever in a position to rent out housing units, I sure don't want to rent them out to people who have a KNOWN propensity to trash them. Nor do I want to rent to a renter with an established history of stiffing landlords on rent payments.

Hmm, that must be a thing that varies by state -- I've never heard of such a provision in KY.

This happens all the time in the Vegas casino industry. Heck, I think all casinos share a "perp" database with photos and everything. Illegal? Definitely not.

Doesn't this run counter to the referenced theory? A selfishly amoral casino would want card counters to bankrupt their competition, no?

Greedy, not just selfish. And it would harm them as well, since everyone would do it.

No, they profit much better by making sure Vegas is a thriving place with many casinos. If they DID manage to drive out all the other casinos, nobody would go to Vegas because it only had 1 casino!

Instead, it's much better to work together and share knowledge of the people who would rip them off.

And Data Protection laws

I call this the "problem of trust" and it is something I'm trying to solve. In order to be able to send out alerts, we need some sort of decentralized broadcast system. I am developing a P2P broadcast system called Proofnet which is based on proof-of-work to prioritize messages and minimize spam. I have describe it on the Bitcoin Forum here:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31038.0

One of the applications of Proofnet is a decentralized web-of-trust where you can send out a scammer alert by giving someone a trust rating of 0 and broadcast that message with very high proof-of-work. See some more info on those efforts here:

https://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=31198.0

It's a good idea, yes.

But in this case, and probably any that follow it, it's extremely unlikely they used/will use their own details or credit cards.

Am I the only one who doesn't think this is that big of a deal for AirBnB?

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