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The state should be regularly auditing hotels and room-shares, checking for fire safety, cleanliness, hidden cameras, and legality of the business.
Businesses don't systematically change in response to a few customer complaints (they just sloppily deal with them), but they do respond to large fines and legal action.
But how would the state regulate this when subletting via Airbnb is already violating the regulations in place?
At least in Oregon where I live, airbnb is legal if you have a business license and maybe a permit depending in your city. The subletting issue is a civil issue that the landlord would have to sue over.
I’m not sure I agree with that. Yelp, for example has sunk countless businesses with poor food and customer service on the basis of customer complaints, and at the same time empowered others to grow. On the room share front, I can’t even count the number of regulated hotels I’ve been at that were completely unsanitary and unsafe.
I think that would work with airbnb's rating system as well if the hidden cameras weren't hidden.
If you know about Gerald Foos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Foos this shouldn’t be a surprise - here’s the New Yorker article https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/gay-talese-the...
And none of these people were prosecuted? Wow. I think voyeurism might just be the least taken-serious crime today.
See also https://www.cbsnews.com/news/making-video-voyeurism-a-crime/ which was absolutely infuriating to find out about.
The camera stuff is beyond creepy. But the name discrepancy seems like it's getting blown out of proportion. Ray is a common nickname for Ralph...
While I wouldn’t like to find a hidden camera, if I did I would not steal them AND steal the keys to the house. I do wonder if you’re renting without the host present if you should just block the camera view and keep staying
Okay HN nerds: what’s the best way to go about sniffing out these hidden cams?
There was a recent BBC video[1] where Stacey Dooley visited South Korea and engaged with police experts there who search for hidden cameras as part of a huge 'peeping-tom'-type problem they have with surveillance (primarily of women) for the purpose of pornography. I concluded from that video that I couldn't really on my technical expertise and a thorough physical search to find a hidden camera. Unless I had something that could detect GSM radios or something of the sort.
You could probably use an SDR to find transmitting wireless devices.
Non-Linear Junction Detector.
https://hackaday.com/2017/09/20/spy-tech-nonlinear-junction-...
the math/physics behind how this works is fascinating, however, NLJDs are expensive, slow and require specialized electronics skills that the average person doesnt have. NLJD is what Military/Intelligence use to sweep a room for bugs.
but at end of the day, it's an arms race where the only way to win is not to play. if it became easy to detect circuits hidden in the walls or in household objects, they can just escalate to tactics like when the KGB used special screws in the beams of the US embassy in Moscow to record ambient audio of the keys pressed on teletypes to recover the messages. then there's the viral video from a few year back demonstrating recovering audio inside a room with a camera aimed through a glass window pane at a foil bag of chips. the same techniques that recover audio also work for video. it's just a signal to reconstruct.
Cameras with night vision mode often have an infrared LED that you can see with most phones front camera.
I believe this trick doesn't work with iPhones, since the lens has a filter that blocks infrared light.
Well the ones that stream live should be detectable by either sniffing wifi traffic or tracing the Ethernet cables. If they're not battery powered they should also be plugged in the mains somewhere, but not sure how you'd find them easily.
If they're battery powered and record to internal memory then you'd probably need to spot them directly.
don’t stay in an Airbnb
This.
If you want to shower in a place, but have to find the hidden cameras prior to taking your shower? I think that's a pretty good sign that you probably shouldn't be showering in that place.
Your eyes and a bright flashlight? Any hidden camera will need a translucent window with a lens behind it, and they're not that hard to spot once you know what you're looking for.
The bigger problem is the VC scum behind the company which as per the typical VC playbook does not care about the negative externalities caused by their creation and will only do the minimum they can get away with.
> In January, Bigham discovered cameras in his rental that he says were never disclosed. After he reached out to the Trust & Safety team, representatives told him he and his family had in fact consented to the cameras because they were visibly displayed in photos on the listing. After Bigham’s blog post on the ordeal went viral, Airbnb apologized and refunded his money.
This kind of behavior is often explained by excuses like incompetence, human error or poor training. There are 2 possible outcomes:
1) It's an obvious lie and tells you everything you need to know about the company, but somehow people keep swallowing it instead of calling BS.
2) It's the true reason but highlights the fact that serious incidents like these are delegated to people with insufficient training because the company doesn't consider the problem serious enough to invest in proper training.
Either option doesn't look good. This is not limited to Airbnb by the way; here are some past examples from other VC-funded companies:
Kitsplit's mis-sold insurance doesn't actually protect against stolen gear, fobs the person off but then does the obvious damage control and pretends to care when the story blew up (no fucks given about the impact on the people until their own reputation becomes at risk): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20276631
Wag "dog walking as a service" startup that tries to silence a killed dog's owners with an NDA, again no concerns for the wellbeing of the owners, only concern about their own reputation: https://www.facebook.com/nick.moore.7140/posts/3600186133211
Wag again, realizing that their entire business model is broken, introduces predatory fees to stay afloat that might not even be enforceable in court: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20854100
I could find many more examples (even from companies I unfortunately worked for in the past - because yes, as a lot of people here I used to be drinking the startup koolaid and was part of the problem too) but I think it's enough to show a clear pattern here - these companies could not care less about the negative externalities of their business or actions on society at large.
AirBNB only makes money by encouraging people to break the law and providing a market place for their illegal services
Literally everything the service does is a negative externality
Why are the VCs to blame and not the founders and executives of AirBnB?
They’re all blameworthy, but the VCs are the ones with the power to stop this sort of nonsense.
Stop investing in nakedly criminal schemes.
In a lot of cases VC is the exact reason why the company has negative externalities. Without VC, something like Airbnb could actually operate on a smaller scale and longer timeframe, making sure to do things properly with regards to laws, consumer protections and better trust & safety. VC encourages the "move fast and break things" and "growth at all costs" mentality and so the current Airbnb is the result.
Or the employees...
No one is forcing these people to work for and enable this toxic company.
Airbnb should just be upfront and tell customers they need to assume they are being filmed at all times. There are cameras now the size of a grain of rice, this issue will never go away, the cat is out of the bag.
Maybe this is not bad advice. Kinda like "don't post any pictures on the internet that you wouldn't want your grandma to see" or "assume your employer is reading all your e-mails". But still, it is a massive invasion of privacy and there should be some recourse for the victims/punishment for the perpetrators.
'Assume any current/future employer will be reviewing what you do at your AirBNB. Enjoy your stay.'
My colleagues and I recently published a paper at CHI 2020 that was inspired in large part by this problem of hidden cameras in AirBnBs. Here is a link to ACM Digital Library (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3313831.3376585) and a PDF copy of the paper on my Box account (https://cmu.box.com/s/89iugeaf3hcc51ir9f4akrp1a9b0mogd).
One of the things we did was a survey of N=226 AirBnB users. 86 people said that they manually searched for devices in AirBnBs, and 8 actually found undisclosed devices. As you might imagine, manually searching is hard because devices are small, but also because you don't always know if you've found everything, and because it looks socially awkward too.
People also reported on how they looked for devices, ranging from manual search (most common) to using WiFi / Bluetooth scanning tools. Here is an excerpt from our paper as to what people said they did.
11 (13%) tech-savvy participants used special tools to help search, such as using a phone camera or flashlight, scanning Bluetooth and the Wi-Fi network, and using an infrared scanner. For example, participants reported that they turned off all the lights and used their smartphone flashlight to shine around the area and look for reflections that might indicate a camera lens. Some participants reported that their smartphone cameras did not have an infrared filter, and so they could detect invisible infrared light emitted by cameras. Other participants reported using smartphone apps, such as Fing and iNet, to detect suspicious devices connecting to the network. Two participants brought RF signal detectors to scan the room for the source of RF signals (cameras). However, these methods require a strong technical background, and the devices might not be cheap (e.g., over $100 USD on Amazon for a popular RF signal detector).
The main point of the paper, though, is to look at ways for IoT device manufacturers to help physically locate devices. We called these IoT Locators. An example might be to have devices blink or beep. It's trying to address the physical layer of privacy, to help people have more awareness of what's nearby and where these devices are. The logical layer might tell you that there's a camera nearby, but we also wanted to help people find those devices and see (for example) where those cameras might be pointed. There's a big difference between a camera in an AirBnb that is pointed toward the living room versus pointed out the window, something that isn't captured just by knowing that a camera is nearby.
There's lots of limitations, for example needing lots of standards among device manufacturers and how to incentivize them to install things like these in devices. I would say the main idea, though, is that we need to really think more about the physical dimensions of privacy (which has been underlooked in research and industry), and that we need to think more about how to help hotels, AirBnBs, and device manufacturers that do want to do better on privacy w.r.t devices, but don't know what to do.
Very interesting but one caveat: I doubt you would ever get the most relevant producers on board. There are dedicated spycam manufacturers and all the cheap China stuff to build into other things is probably what ends up being used to spy on customers. So little benefit to try and get legal or voluntary commitments if in the end many won't play along.
This is what happen in Japan. In Japan phones' camera must ring shutter sound on taking photo that's annoying on many situations meanwhile bad people use dedicated spycam that's silent of course.
Disclaimer: I work on IoT and build things with little speakers and Blinky lights on them.
Solution: Curtains. As in, room-filling curtains, so people can do private things in an Air-b'n-box.
How costly are these cameras? What are their battery life? Do they stream or record locally? Where do people get them?
(I'm obviously not interested in unethical spying, but could be fun to play with)
You can get a camera from Wyze for less than 40 bucks that records in hd, does well in darkness, can be remotely monitored and controlled, records sound, and has a speaker (for talking to my cat). You can set it to trigger recording on movement. I have an sd card in it, and it records about two weeks of events at a time. Records to cloud and/or local storage.
Just be aware that security is never guaranteed and they’ve had some issues in the past.
My favorite part is when the dude who was staying in an illegal flophouse calls the police about cameras
Gee I wonder why the police response was not kind to him
Could Airbnb solve this by implementing large fines for hosts where hidden cameras are found?
There's also the issue of a guest setting up a hidden camera in their rented airbnb without the hosts knowledge. I doubt most hosts are sophisticated enough to even do simple things like see what devices are connected to their wifi networks or cycle wifi passwords on a per-guest basis.
Ironically you'd need hidden cameras to catch guests that place hidden cameras in rentals.
The state should solve this is by making it a felony. And make Airbnb civilly liable.
AirBnB should just offer a hidden camera/microphone sweep service.
Not needed. I just don't use AirBnB anymore.
I suspect the problem isn't with the cameras, but with landlords they can't control - and that interfere with AirBnb's bottom line.
Why would you not do this? It decreases risk, and customers mostly care about price. As technology gets better, this is inevitable.
Cameras pointed at the bed? Sounds like voyeurism not security
Because it’s a massive invasion of privacy and customers hate it?
Yes, they’re price sensitive, but if Airbnb carried a “you will be recorded while you sleep” disclaimer I doubt many would agree.