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I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?
by ehnto 5y ago
I don't see why if I got my credentials right, I have to prove I am not a robot. What if I wanted a robot to access my account on my behalf?
- dannyw 5y agoBecause they can't distinguish that from a robot ran by a malicious hacker trying to access other people's accounts using stolen credentials. Particularly for Airbnb, who deals with travelers (visits from international locations; shared IP ranges like airport wifi and cgNAT, etc).
- throwaway2037 5y agoYour last sentence is interesting. I never considered that AirBnB needs to battle more of this hard-to-distinguish traffic. In another thread on this page, someone else mentioned that -- when logged in with your Google account -- various Google sites/assets never show CAPTCHAS, because it has so much information about your account that they can reliably predict if you are human or robot. I'm surprised they don't offer this as a feature to 3rd party commercial websites. "Add Google login and we can remove 99% of your CAPTCHAS (but you have to be X cents per login)."
- kashnote 5y agoI assume they’re trying to fight against bots buying up “hot” Airbnbs that sell out quickly. It’s a weird captcha for sure, but understandable why they wouldn’t want bots accessing the site.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoWait, what does a robot do once it rents a house?
- cillian64 5y agoDream of electric sheep?
- yreg 5y agoIt sets up a workshop inside to build more robots.
- birdyrooster 5y agoDepends if its a member of the Church of Appliantology, let alone those miniature rubberized homo replicas.
- pjc50 5y agoSublet it to a human. It's a market, so it's potentially susceptible to HFT and arbitrage bots like anything else.
- smcl 5y agoSublet it? I mean it's possible that someone really dedicated writes a bot to reserve a room for themselves, but more likely it'd be done by someone who will list it somewhere else for an even higher fee.
- aembleton 5y agoAirbnb could just raise their prices by 10% if they detect a bot; that would be a way to take a cut of someone doing that. It would be really subtle too, so they wouldn't know that they'd been detected.
- rocqua 5y agoPerhaps it takes 'pre-orderes'. You want a place to stay, inform the bot "give me anything good in this area when available", pay the bot extra money, and then the bot goes out and hits the good rooms in the area the moment they become available.
- throwaway2037 5y agoThis sound like a great idea for Futurama (TV show) episode with Bender (the robot).
- dannyw 5y agoDoes this actually happen??
- bartread 5y agoAnd why would they care if it did, if the robots are "buying" the properties, implying payment?
- dollop43 5y agoThat makes the impression that Airbnb is always out of service, and the other platform selling Airbnb rent is more available. It creates a competitor and worsen the service of Airbnb at the same time.
- fragmede 5y agoimplying payment, until the last second when the robot's operators decide they can only have one unit to live in. Or any other such scams
- londons_explore 5y agoIt is a way to bankrupt competing Airbnb properties. Book them all up with hundreds of fake accounts with stolen credit cards. Nobody ends up staying in them, but it can bankrupt the Airbnb host pretty quickly if they have many properties on highly leveraged mortgages.
- orlp 5y agoIf you have bots buying your merchandise as fast as possible you don't have a bot problem, you have a pricing problem.
- Brian_K_White 5y agohere we go
- rocqua 5y agoThere can be good reasons to keep prices "below market value".
- barry-cotter 5y agoThere’s nothing immoral about taking advantage of someone else’s marketing budget. If they feel like pricing below market that’s great. If you can resell their stuff for more great. If they don’t like it they can try to stop you. You can’t fix the real price of things far from market demand without the full force of the state behind you and that usually doesn’t work either.
- nefitty 5y agoThey probably want to reduce scraping and definitely unauthorized account access. In addition, Airbnb has thousands of A/B tests running at all times. Scrapers may try to decode pricing algorithms, price fluctuations, etc. The traffic and interest to an offering also has an impact on its search ranking. There are also anon account crews that will make many fake accounts using sourced credentials from their social group or bought on darknets. Generally, those only result in things like pop-up events from which entry fees are collected. I assume some could use the same method to commit robbery. Another method is to use a botnet of fake accounts and use the bots to build up fake reputation, eg offer a fake listing, book the fake listing, leave good reviews, etc. There are also some weird currency arbitrage opportunities that might be found if someone was really inclined. From what I saw of that aspect, you'd have to be really looking for pennies in the couch seams. Source: Did major customer support work for Airbnb pre-ipo
- Rygian 5y agoNo can do. You would be in breach of the AirBNB terms of service: "Do not use bots, crawlers, scrapers or other automated means to access or collect data or other content from or otherwise interact with the Airbnb Platform. "
- Brian_K_White 5y agoA browser is a bot that interacts with the platform. It's not physically possible to use any website except by directing a tool to do it for you.
- rnhmjoj 5y agoYes, it seems everybody has forgotten the meaning of User Agent.
- Rygian 5y agoProbably the nuance that is not spelled out (and certainly should be) is that AirBNB expects only interactive user agents, and not automated/batch user agents.
- Brian_K_White 5y agoAll those lines of code in a browser are automation.
- withinboredom 5y agoNot to mention screen readers.
- fredoliveira 5y agoDo you always go for the technicality and the gotcha? Isn't that best applied elsewhere rather than here? Because sure, lines of code in a browser are technically automation, but they don't automate your actions so your whole point is moot. And you know this, I'm sure, so you're wasting your (and everybody else's) time.
- lbriner 5y agoBecause their site is valuable data and if you automate access to it, you can re-sell their services without having to use their site with all its tracking/ads/metrics etc. They want people to hit their site and get cross-sold, not order through some aggregator.
- throwaway2037 5y agoIf I recall correctly, GitLab has a concept of "keys" (akin to SSH keys) that you can grant for your account. On of the categories is API -- which is specifically for this use case. If I ran my own commercial website, I would probably also disallow robot logins for the UI. It seems like too much trouble with no commecial upside. However, I could imagine allowing robot accounts to access tiny sliver of the API.