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Comment by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | Hacker News Reader

So someone does not smoke in their room but they’re charged for cleaning anyway because a third party (Rest) told the hotel that they smoked in their room. What sort of evidence should one gather during their stay to make the strongest possible (defamation? fraud?) case against Rest? (Not that anyone wants to do that on their trip, just curious about the legal implications.)

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Would it work if it were real time? You light up, and five minutes later a manager knocks.

Dunno about the legality of refusing to open the door, but it does sound like a way to get banned from a hotel chain.

Yeah, that’s totally fair. At least they’ll have testimony that the smoking was actually witnessed. Most people aren’t going to even bother fighting that since it actually happened. I just worry about abuse cases and the most obvious one here is false positives being assumed true by everyone who profits from them.

Edit:

Sorry, that’s from the wrong point of view but I don’t think the answer changes. It seems Rest will have to change a lot of their marketing language to really avoid liability but if someone is actually caught smoking then it’s not likely to manifest.

The great thing about that kind of human validation is that if they get a lot of false positives, the managers will start ignoring all of the alerts.

It would be unfair to charge people with just a black box algorithm. But a few door knocks could fix that, one way or the other.

Is it reasonable to make "use your body to test for carcinogens" part of the manager's job description?

Yeah really, I mean look at how the global population died out in the 1960s because someone walked past them with a lit cigarette.

You realize there's a difference between cigarette smoke and mustard gas, right? Standing at the door of a room that someone smoked in will have no effect on your health whatsoever. You need to be standing in the room, while they're smoking, preferably for a few decades.

people from the 60s die every day

Yeah, six decades later.

shockingly it's been happening since about 1959

But not because they walked past someone smoking a cigarette.

Generally you have no rights in a hotel to prevent entry.

From the thread, it sounds as if they don't even pretend this is about cleaning, they're just saying "we're a smoke-free hotel, so smoking costs $500 as a punitive measure, period".

I wonder if they could legally separate this from any real-world activities completely? During check-in, put a clause in the contract "if our partner company says so, you have to pay $500 extra. By signing, you agree to that" - without any reference to smoking at all.

I hope this wouldn't be legal, but it sounds like it could be.

Religious freedom may come into play here. Incense and candles are a basis for many faiths so assigning a fee on people practicing their faith will cost them in court and in payouts.

Not unless the hotel is government owned or fall into a few very specific carveouts.

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