Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts | Hacker News Reader

Device detection and occupancy monitoring for Airbnb hosts

minut.com

17 pointsmikeodds50 comments

This is a microcosm of everything that has gone wrong in modern technological society. Most Airbnbs have occupancy rules that bar any daytime visitors if read strictly. This has been normalized under the understanding that the policy isn’t strictly enforceable, but exists as a backstop for situations where extra visitors cause damage/nuisances.

So if you want to have a (perhaps spontaneous) guest over or a small polite gathering, as long as you don't cause a disturbance, it's no harm no foul. This is beneficial to the social fabric and doesn't bring any detriment to the host or neighbors. Yet, thanks to the marvels of technology, we can now detect and deter these aberrances that would have otherwise gone unnoticed!

I think you're being disingenuous in that you're only looking at half the story. I don't use AirBnB either as a host or a guest, so I may be missing something here, but to me, this seems to fall squarely into "this is why we can't have nice things" territory.

Of course, if you have someone over for coffee, there probably is no issue. Of course, if you have many people over for a crazy party, there will probably be a boatload of issues.

The problem is there are plenty of dishonest people who'll try to skirt their responsibilities in the in-between situations. Maybe it's difficult to hide that you've had 50 people over. But if you're renting for, say, 4 people and you have 10 more people over? I'd guess it's not directly evident. So if those people aren't hell-bent on thrashing the place, but you know, shit happens? Perhaps the guest will try to say that the couch already had a wine stain, or the dishes were already chipped, or whatever. And if a neighbor complained about the noise? There were just four of us, we kept it reasonable, but we can't be completely mute.

So of course hosts will try to hedge against these behaviors. And, of course, people trying to be reasonable will get the short straw. Next thing you know, water will be found to be wet or something crazy like that.

>The problem is there are plenty of dishonest people who'll try to skirt their responsibilities in the in-between situations.

And the hosts who want to use strict enforcement of rules that were designed around not being enforced unless something bad enough to notice had happened bear no blame?

Are they not just as dishonest?

What about the internet cheerleaders who validate such behavior with their "rules are rules" ignorance, as if things were that simple?

Sure? I mean, multiple people can be dicks at the same time, even to each other. That doesn't absolve the other party.

My point was that saying "it's only hosts" or, indeed, "it's only guests" is not fully honest.

Edit:

I think the underlying thing is hard to set out. Basically, it's "don't be a dick", and it applies to both hosts and guests. But how do you enforce that? So this devolves into a situation where everybody tries to pin the blame on the other, and / or make sure to cover their ass as much as possible.

Which brings me back to my general point: this is why we can't have nice things.

> nice things

I've been constructing my own fantasy that there is an emergent-trust-group-of-respectful-people where "nice things" are just normal.

Perhaps implies an opposite group of defective arseholes together?

Maybe aspirational but the idea is to just be reliably good and eventually others trust you and you become part of a trust network.

I've had it happen at the scale of individuals: once you've shown you're trustworthy and unselfish then many people seem to respond to that with goodness.

Most people can smell selfishness such as "manifestation" thinking. I find it difficult to be generous without intent of obligations. I believe it only works if you're genuinely good with no strings attached.

Kindness is easier.

I'm no fan of karma or religion or magical woowoo: even though ultimately the idea perhaps has the same roots as those.

It isn't reciprocation: that is transactional investment. Reciprocation definitely works fabulously well. However it has debts and credits, and I have some sort of unreasonable antipathy towards those both. We live in a transactional society, and many people inspect every action of others for their needy goals. Or people have their own currencies and balance sheets.

I try to frame the fantasy more rationally as an emergent behaviour of society as a response to defectors.

So far my main negative proof against the whole idea is that I've had life pretty good even though I have been normal levels of selfishness. I'm still working on how that fits in.

Meanwhile I'm giving the experiment a good go. I like to test against my own reality. Finding I'm wrong is usually valuable.

It's a poorly thought out fantasy. Too many reasons why it is broken: Like seeing givers enable takers, or selfish people winning good things.

(edited to make clearer)

We have to err on the side of humanity. Wear and tear and some bending of rules is part of the human condition and should be considered the cost of doing business in the STR space. I believe increasing neurosis, anxiety, and social dysfunction can be explained by increasing systemization, surveillance and rigidity in the world.

On the other hand, you could argue that the reason they have a “no daytime visitors” rule in the first place is because they have no way of knowing how manhunt visitors there are so they just make the rule “none” so they don’t have to try to provide how many were there at once.

If you could accurately know how many people there are and when they are there, you could have a more reasonable rule like “no more than 3 guests during the day and they have to leave by 9pm” or something.

This is purely party prevention. I've had ZERO pushback asking to host a group of friends over for dinner. I ask the owner. Mild inconvenience IMO when you think about the problem they are trying to prevent, the home being thrashed by a large party and the guests having no care about your home.

I can also imagine the problems when someone has, for instance, their work and personal phones with them.

People seem to be pretty universally incapable of not assuming computer products to be infallible, especially when they might get some extra money in "over occupancy" fees.

There are, unfortunately, a lot of listings on airbnb/vrbo/etc. that just shouldn't be. Not because the listings are bad, but because the people are looking to make a buck with the least amount of effort or care as possible. Technologies like this arise when there are too many of that category in a market.

100%. In less than a decade this so-called innovation went from "I want to host travelers in my spare bedroom to help make rent" to "I want to buy up homes in popular areas during a housing crunch and pimp them out to frat parties". I have lived next to a property by one of these "superhosts" and it's hell on the neighborhood.

STRs are a disgusting and tasteless business and I avoid staying in them at all costs

Short-term rentals really need to be taxed accordingly to compensate for the cost of their externalities (loss of single-family houses in the market). I'm not sure how many localities do this.

No way. Hotels are already too expensive as are restaurants. I like to stay in a place and I don't want the cost increased just because the local gov't won't build housing. That is a different problem and I guarantee that tax won't fix anything.

Do you think that cities exist just for you to travel to? A little insight: these places require _residents_ to run the restaurants and destinations you like to visit. These residents are quickly getting priced out and the deluge of STRs is making the issue worse.

Maybe, just maybe, the STRs could be taxed and that money goes towards building more housing.

Just legalize building housing lol

Indeed. I live in a wealthy suburb in Oregon in the U.S., but my specific neighborhood is fairly middle class starter homes. It's nestled in an ordinarily very quiet and extremely safe place.

The next street over from me is an affordable housing duplex complex. I think about 20-30 duplexes total which house families with children. This is not a college town nor does it have anything within walking distance that would make it attract the busy-life. Several of these duplexes recently vacated their tenants and remodeled to charge more rent. The rent increase was too much and they sat empty for some time. The owners then put it up for sale and it was subsequently bought up by AirBnB investors.

This has brought a litany of issues. We've had several instances now of huge house parties where they rent all of the duplexes at once, and this has brought large police encounters. There's been property damage and violence against neighbors as a result of these parties. The commotion is not contained unfortunately and bleeds out into the neighboring streets, including my residence. We're talking probably a good 500ft radius from the actual AirBnB homes to the surrounding neighborhood. That's a large blast radius for those of us that never agreed to have this sort of presence so close to our homes. I feel awful for the homes in the actual complex, is they are getting the brunt of the disruption.

The last time I finally had it and collected video evidence then reported them to AirBnb citing the violence, property damage, and police reports. AirBnb was surprisingly responsive and so far it's been a couple of months without any issues - knock on wood. However my anger at the displacement of low income families in place of AirBnb homes remains. They have zero investment in the well-being of our neighborhood and only care about turning a profit on the homes. It frustrates me to no end.

The ACLU in NH brought a class action lawsuit after these devices ended up in public housing. The devices also detect sound levels by intermittently sampling audio. Looking at the FCC teardown of the devices it is clear they are one firmware update away from streaming audio from all occupants living rooms.

https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-09-02/concord-housing-auth...

>> How does Crowd Detect estimate occupancy? >> It detects the number of nearby iOS devices in a property and compares it to your defined threshold. If the count is exceeded, Minut sends an alert.

OK so Android users are safe, then. Woohoo!

Low risk there, Android users are way less likely to throw a party

Wouldn't this be possible with a NUC/RaspberryPi and a bluetooth adapter?

e.g. if you suddenly start seeing tons of beacons above the historical maximum, that's a good indicator.

(Not trying to be "dropbox is just rsync", just commenting on the iOS only limitation)

Of course, but most AirBnB hosts want a product, not a project.

Their property is a project.

This product allows them to charge additional fees without being present hosts or even receiving a complaint.

I don't think the average airbnb owner can exit vim.

Five bucks says it's just an ESP32 with some sensors wired up to it going to "their" cloud. That's all they all end up being, just in a fancy package buttoned up for the end user.

I ripped apart a https://restsensor.com/ "hotel air quality sensor" I got on eBay and it ended up being just that: an ESP32 hooked to a Sensiron SEN55.

Either that or some ESP32. It also includes a smart smoke alarm and noise meter. But property managers aren't going to want to roll their own solution to this.

Here's the FCC documents for one of the minut devices to judge for yourself:

https://fccid.io/2AFXO-AM01/Internal-Photos/internal-photo-6...

I wonder how Airbnb would respond to a host complaint that uses this data, because of the following story:

A few years ago me and a bunch of friends rented a big Airbnb with a no dogs policy. Some other friends were in the same town, with a dog, and came over and hung out in the yard for a while with their dog. The dog also briefly went in the house (which I think is poor form, to be clear). Somehow the Airbnb host was in the neighborhood and drove by the house to check on it, saw the dog, and then messaged Airbnb to complain.

My friend counter-complained to Airbnb that the host was surveilling us. And the end result was that Airbnb discounted the Airbnb by 50% (over $1000). The owner got nothing out of it. Very surprising to me.

> The dog also briefly went in the house (which I think is poor form, to be clear).

Extremely poor form. Dog people seem to struggle with accepting these kinds of boundaries around their dogs for reasons I’ve never understood.

Although I don’t think the dog should have been in the yard, either. No dogs means no dogs. There can be liability/insurance reasons on top of just not wanting dog shit in your yard.

> My friend counter-complained to Airbnb that the host was surveilling us.

I can’t imagine being an Airbnb host with issues like this.

I’ve stayed in plenty of airbnbs where the owners lived nearby, and noticing a tenant breaking the rules when you drive by doesn’t sound like surveillance.

Interesting that it can only count iOS devices considering Apple is more privacy focused. What's the secret sauce that prevents Android phones being counted in the same way?

I would have thought Android's constant Wi-Fi scanning that Google uses for improving their indoor location services would be an easy give away.

None of the developers ever saw one, or they firmly believe focusing on iOS makes the product more 'luxe'

I'd assume it's because it's easier to look for an Apple MAC prefix than trying to figure out if some other device is a phone or not.

But with MAC randomization (both wifi and Bluetooth), I'm not sure what they are doing here that would effectively sort iPhones from other devices doing the same.

Android does the same MAC rotation that Apple does, both on WiFi and Bluetooth. Working with IoT sniffing solutions at home, I've found it's reasonably easy to detect when a single MAC is randomly changed: it'll be broadcasting its presence, suddenly go dark, and then another mac with same first 3 bytes starts broadcasting with a very similar RSSI. This works with BLE adverts pretty well and allows me to filter out MAC noise from household devices while I'm trying to sniff something on my bench.

I'd much prefer this over a host slapping up cameras everywhere.

To anyone wanting to throw parties at an airbnb, switch to Android!

You have to get the guests to install an app? Hell no that won't work.

Works only with iOS. I guess only people with iPhones rent houses for parties?

Green text ppl aren't getting invited

I'm guessing it's because iPhones are easier to characterize over dozens of different android MAC address prefixes.

But with MAC address randomization, I don't recall Apple doing anything different than other vendors so not sure what they are detecting that an Android wouldn't reveal as well.

Isn't it rather detecting UWB or pings from NFB reader? But at least the latter should work also do detect Android phones (see also https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/1jsr9jv/eavesdroppi...).

Yeah that makes more sense than wifi or Bluetooth. It's probably more of a guarantee than a hard limit on only detecting iPhones. The list of devices with UWB support show all iPhone models since the 11 (except e models) but for Android, it's mostly just the pro/plus/ultra versions of the flagships.

Another great example of novel surveillance application for technology.

I was thinking whether supermarkets or other entities might track who is shopping. Of course they can just use facial recognition at this point, but you could imagine them doing device level tracking, just like browser cookies track you as you wander the internet. But Apple cycles your MAC address, so maybe you can't correlate visitors across visits?

In general, circumventing this would require having your device go dark or intensionally pretend to be multiple devices simultaneously?

wasn't there an algo developed that would use wifi signal as a way to detect humans / movements even behind walls.

I imagine that would be a neater solution. if all what you need is a wifi receiver.

Absolutely, maybe 15 years ago, and it was / is used by shops to detect recurring visitors and get a better understanding of their behavior.

It’s also why anonymization of wifi started being pushed by Apple et al, which still does provide a stable client id but that’s only being broadcast as part of the DHCP handshake, which cannot be used here.

You could look for Bluetooth MACs instead but those too are randomized. Are any other vendors randomizing Bluetooth MACs? Maybe that's what they detect, MACs that don't go to any known vendor.

There's also much more recent research where you can actually track the position of people by the changes to the Wifi signal. Passive monitoring only, no device involved. See https://github.com/Saad-Imtiaz/WiFi-Sense for example (first thing I found by looking up now, never tried myself).

For years starting in the late teens and fizzling out over covid university paper after university paper about "this is so cool look how we can see through walls by essentially using 5g and wifi as ambient light" and they steadily marched up the chain from simple room layouts to furniture layouts, occupant detection, occupant movement and then started being dressed up with the usual dogwhistle language about "emergency services" that people who are building tech to help infantry/police entry teams use to make it seem more noble and then after that it all just kinda stopped being publicized with any sort of regularity?

To me that says that the tech got good enough all those people got hired to make it production worthy behind closed doors.

yes -- I think xfinity uses it to implement this: https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion

All the pictures show nice, large houses in a suburb. What about apartments in a bigger building? Will the neighbor's visitors trigger this? Would turning off BT completely bypass this?

"Crowd Detect uses passive signals from nearby iOS devices to estimate occupancy."

Thank god Android doesn't fuck my privacy like that.

Quite the logical leap

Another reason to just get a hotel room.

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