Airbnb is deploying AI to block New Year's Eve bookings that could be parties
news.airbnb.com
news.airbnb.com
The psychographic target is also not some mystery advanced ai has to unravel… Individuals who relish social settings, finding joy in connections with others, often possess an adventurous spirit, embracing novelty and pursuing thrills. Typically extroverted, they thrive amidst lively atmospheres, delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly found at gatherings. Prioritizing fun and relaxation, these individuals treasure parties as opportunities to unwind and savor life's pleasures. Some among them exhibit a willingness to take risks, drawn to experiences that provide an adrenaline rush and a sense of adventure.
With all this said, airbnb is literally attacking the majority of the user base that made airbnb what it is. Sounds like airbnb may need to rebrand to Auntie BnB and start charging micro-transactions for small thrills once their user base is thoroughly oppressed.
Genuine question, but how will Airbnb know this about you? Are you suggesting they've bought some 3rd party dataset that contains this information about its customers, or is somehow inferring these precise personality interests by looking at a customer's prior bookings?
I'm aware Airbnb lets you book 'experiences', which could be used to infer personality, but I'm not sure how popular these actually are (as an extrovert with extroverted friends in their lates 20s/early 30s I don't know anyone that has booked any).
I think it's possibly much simpler than we think - they can probably just look at your average booking size by number of guests (to determine how likely you frequently party), the type of property/location you've booked, and how close to NYE you've made the booking (a last minute NYE booking with 13 guests screams party).
That would be profiling. Instead, we have an ethical AI. :)
I have always been a party throwing animal. This clinical detachment you speak of is a human that realizes how detached clinical assessments actually are.
I wish your post was written by GPT, it makes me sadder that a human wrote it.
Easy peasy lemon full-on technofascist authoritarianism dystopian hellhole.
This doesn't say how it works, and Airbnb has published things like this before, like "Airbnb deploys AI to crack down on parties over Halloween" from a couple months ago, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38016113 or in general "Airbnb Is Launching 'Anti-Party Tools' to Stop Parties" from mid-2022, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497758.
At this point I think we can say this news is more a marketing blurb than anything new or interesting.
This is most likely a (simple) ML model trained on previous reports of such bookings.
Not newsworthy, but probably not a bunch of if-statements.
Generally speaking, unless you're in the EU, you won't be successful in suing a company that blocks you and doesn't provide a reason.
The result is a bunch of if-statements. ;)
booking.decline(show_random_error=True)
else:
booking.confirm()
In the US, Federal law makes age discrimination illegal only if the victim is over 40.
On the other hand, if you build some model/classifier, and say:
Given data/features, and some constraints, minimize/maximize for probability of partying.
Then that black-box model could be used to classify whether a potential renter is likely/at risk to host a party or not.
You're not explicitly saying "NO PEOPLE OF CERTAIN SKIN COLOR OR GENDER UNDER A CERTAIN AGE ALOWED", but rather your classifier is doing it for you, without stating it plainly - because maybe the above group happens to get classified a lot to the "party" group/class. Such models could have a lot of bias.
So much fun.
The attestation is fine but blocking?
I wonder if can be used to do other stuff, like ML models that distribute the guests in certain ways to increase the chance of certain people meet in order to boost or suppress political movements. Maybe block or overprice individuals likely to engage in environmental activities in sponsorship with the oil companies? Maybe arrange pricing and availability in certain way to demoralize people from certain ideologies so it's more likely they have less energy and money to their thing.
This is the kind of stuff EU needs to block.
Airbnb needs to be blocked all together in the EU. I lost track of how many cities pushed people out and became unaffordable to the locals, because the rentals went to Airbnbs and tourists.
Housing should be for shelter of the people who live, work and study there, not for tourists, they have registered hotels, motels, inns, etc dedicated just for that.
There's a shortage of housing everywhere, there's no place for Airbnb in such an environment.
Every app that starts with the idea of renting "just a room", quickly turns into an unofficial mass market rental scheme by the users. Same how every app that starts with the idea of traveling, socializing and meeting new people, eventually gets turned into an unofficial dating and hookup app by its users.
Our elected leaders in charge of regulating this are often the ones directly profiting from Airbnbs and overinflated housing markets.
They often directly or through family and friends own several properties in desirable neighborhoods. So why would they?
I opt for hotels as much as I possibly can, but when travelling with a group or family, hotels are perceived as "anti-social," which I think is really the only thing keeping Airbnb alive at this stage — the social norms.
Apartment rentals on booking.com/hotels.com is, at least, a bit closer to what I want — but most are still tailored around the long-stay/corporate travellers... Airbnb does fill that niche well.
But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.
Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
Every free market has a lot of asterixis and contingencies to prevent exploitations and imbalances, such as the introduction of tariffs.
It's a free market if you and me living and working in the same country are competing for the same real estate. But if much wealthier foreigners from a country where the average salary is 5x higher or private equity firms can come and easily swoop up that real estate from us, it's no longer free market, it's just economic colonialism.
The problem with the current free market is that it's free as in freedom but not free as in beer, meaning it's no longer people competing with other people for assets, but piles of money competing against other international piles of money, and the bigger piles are winning.
All this just leads to the ever increasing wealth inequality.
The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory), but works very poorly at doing the same for life necessities like housing where costs keep going up as they're treated as investment vehicles not as commodities.
The Airbnb problem highlights that free markets shouldn't be applied everywhere as there's often important considerations that go beyond just making someone some money.
> The free market is efficient at creating competition to drive down the costs of goods and services and drive up the quality(in theory)
I know that's the general belief of free markets, but in reality the size of businesses counts far more than their efficiency or quality. Arguably, we don't have free markets as that would entail people having sufficient knowledge about the products/services and that just doesn't happen as the people with the most money can easily influence people (e.g. marketing, advertising, buying news services etc).
It's not really differently in any way, I'm on the same page as you.
Capitalism is mostly driven by greed to amass more wealth, and real estate is a finite form of wealth.
I don’t know. I prefer my accommodations with a front desk, if only because I tend to check in at odd hours and it’s nice having a human available to help if there are issues.
By comparison AirBnB seems like those annoying customer service “AIs” who are always eager to let you know how much you can get accomplished on the company’s website.
But on more than one occasion I've got a strong “you can't just leave us out here with no clue!” vibe which really makes me wonder just what else they expect me to do!
And so the houses gets trashed and whilst insurance covers the damage it doesn't cover lost income.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
> Article 22(1) of the UK GDPR limits the circumstances in which you can make solely automated decisions, including those based on profiling, that have a legal or similarly significant effect on individuals.
"legal or similarly significant effect on individuals" includes discrimination based on any protected characteristics.
AirBnB in any defence will have to prove that race, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc were _not_ part of any automated decision.
As the article mentions that this is being deployed to the UK I have cited a UK specific article.
Wouldn't the workaround for airbnb to be having a member of staff 'approve' the decision (where the member of staff has thousands to approve a day,and understands that their job is to just click approve all the time).
Right to protest[0]
Right to strike[1]
Human rights[2]
[0] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-passing-new-pub...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/05/uk-ministers...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/19/rishi-sunak-...
Update: For the down-voters, my wife was banned from Airbnb for being from the “wrong” country despite her being a naturalized US citizen.
There are lots of laws that may apply here. The First Amendment isn’t one of them.
Certain political and medical positions have received active suppression on these platforms which are then defended as misinformation only to be shown accurate years later.