8 ms·

Sex workers have been banned from Airbnb for years

thereare5lights 4y ago
> The likely answer is that Airbnb used Jay’s biometric data to refine its facial-recognition technology, a practice that earlier this year landed the company in court, using a product with the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue. > Freya didn’t use Airbnb properties for sex work, but she had her suspicions about how Airbnb flagged her. In May of 2020, before adopting cryptocurrency, she was paying for escorting advertisements with her credit card. Data sharing between platforms could have led Airbnb to algorithmically put two and two together. > Airbnb is developing a product that essentially assigns each of us a social credit score.
version_five 4y ago
The accusation is that Airbnb is using facial recognition to deny people lodging. It's a reddit link so I don't know if it's true, but if so, it seems my 2033 prediction from an hour ago is coming early. This shouldn't stand, we need proper regulation (which I can't believe I'm arguing for) to prevent companies from making their own rules like this. It's a failure of government. (If the whole thing is true, I'd want some proper confirmation. But even if it isnt, this is not the first situation like this)
- thereare5lights 4y ago
  meant to link to the article that the reddit post links to. sent a request to have that fixed so hopefully the link gets updated
  - dang 4y ago
    Yes. Fixed now. (Submitted URL was https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zzvntv/sex_workers_have_been_banned_from_airbnb_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zzvntv/sex_work...).
- mtmail 4y ago
  > It's a reddit link so I don't know if it's true, Reddit links to the source article at https://www.thenation.com/article/society/airbnb-banning-sex-workers/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/airbnb-banning-sex... > If the whole thing is true, I'd want some proper confirmation. The thenation.com article links to a court case (to be precise a complaint, so it hasn't been heard in court yet) https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-identity-verification-for-airbnb-illinois-class-action/ https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-iden...
bigjoes 4y ago
[flagged]
theCrowing 4y ago
That's a whole lot of shesaid without receipts.
- thereare5lights 4y ago
  > That's a whole lot of shesaid without receipts. From the article > Airbnb more or less admitted this four years earlier when it told Jay it had found her picture: How else would it have been unearthed? > Airbnb’s open admission to Freya and her partner that their accounts were suspended as a result of Freya’s sex work suggests that Airbnb, which until recently denied targeting sex workers when not avoiding the question entirely, is confident in the surveillance technology it has been refining for years.
  - theCrowing 4y ago
    Still nothing...
    - thereare5lights 4y ago
      https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-identity-verification-for-airbnb-illinois-class-action/ https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-iden...
      - theCrowing 4y ago
        That would mean that jumio and not airbnb is at fault.
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago
[flagged]
- kelseyfrog 4y ago
  That's just basic freedom of association. If technology provides a way to deduce association at scale, it doesn't mean that freedom of association is wrong. Take the second amendment as an example. The invention of automatic weapons doesn't invalidate the second amendment. In the same way, the creation of realtime identification and syndicated blocklists won't invalidate the freedom of association. Besides, we already deny people things based on what they do all the time. I don't go into a church and expect to be met with open arms. They wouldn't have me as I am and them and I both know it.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    "It's not literally criminal" is a very poor defense. So is pretending that anybody who thinks A did something crappy is out to deny A basic freedoms to do anything. If you can't go to a concert because MegaCorp X got into a legal fight with MegaCorp Y, it's a crappy situation, and it deserves to be called as such without implying that this means you denying MegaCorp X rights to have legal fights or their right of association. You can both have rights and not use them in crappy ways. Not sure what this has to do with the second amendment... Seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      I use the second amendment as an example of an enshrined right that doesn't change when new tech develops. It's an analogy. Freedom of association doesn't change when we develop new tech either. > You can both have rights and not use them in crappy ways. And using rights in crappy ways doesn't mean we revoke them. See all the speech I disagree with and yet still support the freedom of speech. Again, I'm using an analogy here.
      - ceejayoz 4y ago
angry_octet 4y ago
I look forward to differential pricing based on every client's characteristics. Libertarians will be charged double, and have their bookings cancelled randomly just before cancelation fees become too high. People with DV charges or who don't return their shopping trolleys will be refused.
dogboxz 4y ago
How about banning the pimps and punters instead? They're the real villains, not the women they're exploiting and raping.
- xeromal 4y ago
  Sounds like if you ban the sex workers, the pimps and punters will have nothing to do at the airbnb so its effectively the same?
  - blast 4y ago
    The article isn't really about banning the use of Airbnbs for sex work. It's about banning people who do that work from using any Airbnb at all, for any purpose.
- rgoulter 4y ago
  I recall seeing a post about how Sweden had banned "buying sex", but allowed "selling sex", as a way of avoiding harming women. For women who do want to sell sex, this ends up with some bad consequences. https://www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/comments/n11oqk/the_ongoing_witchhunt_for_fssw_in_sweden_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/comments/n11oqk/the_ongo...
- yucky 4y ago
  Not all prostitutes have pimps, especially in this digital age. And how did we end up with Schrödingers Hooker who is both poor oppressed victim and empowered "Yass Queen" sex worker? Also, it's not at all unreasonable for people to not want their property used as a brothel.
71a54xd 4y ago
I'm progressive and live in an east coast city - but to be honest I don't support the proliferation of sex work or the removal of social stigma. Sites like OnlyFans are really just a conduit for further exploitation and promoting the idea to other young women that selling their bodies is an acceptable form of income. It's certainly dystopian for AirBnB to target customers like this - but the government is who pioneered this kind of outsourced sleuthing. If I was a host on AirBnB the last thing I'd want is for my property to be used to shoot a porno - clearly that's the intent of AirBnB I can't really blame them here other than the way they went about doing it.
- mbg721 4y ago
  This issue creates some strange political bedfellows; hardcore midwestern conservatives and disconcerted coastal liberals see the sharing-economy of sex and agree that it's exploitative and bad for women.
  - 71a54xd 4y ago
    I think we're slowly entering a new era of intellectual / practical honesty as a result of so much division and political grandstanding. Nuanced opinion is important - not changing what you think to fit into a cookie cutter thought group is how we understand what we really want, what progress is and who to exclude as irate grifters (on both sides of the isle). The issue of abortion also shows similar political bedfellows - even deep red states where Trump won by 20+ points during the 2016 election have vehemently upheld access to abortion.
    - mbg721 4y ago
      The abortion issue is especially weird to me, because I'm heavily emotionally invested in the Catholic extreme worldview while conservatives as a whole are not.
      - 71a54xd 4y ago
        IMO as someone who grew up in the south, I had friends in very deeply religious families who got abortions quietly. They clearly knew it was the best course of action to reduce emotional harm, a potential bad life for the child and cover for peers who would religiously shame them (ironic - I know).
Overtonwindow 4y ago
This is a double edge sword. She should be allowed to use the service, without question, but Airbnb is right to be concerned properties might be used for prostitution. Airbnb does not trust sex workers.
rmk 4y ago
Why is it surprising or out of place? How is this different from hotels that will not rent out rooms to prostitutes, even if they are not 'working'? I imagine it must be burdensome to AirBnB to distinguish the two scenarios, and it will likely ruin their reputation, same as drug dealing out of hotel rooms or airbnb properties would. If hotel chains have these databases of sex workers in their workers heads' (hotel managers presumably have lists or can recognize sex workers by sight), then why can't AirBnB build a database or use facial recognition to do the same thing? And hotels are not denying Muslims access to bookings, so why imply that AirBnB would/could? I'm trying to understand how AirBnB, which necessarily has to rely on technology to perform these functions (that hotels already do via their employees) is such a threat.
josephcsible 4y ago
Compare the position "Airbnb shouldn't refuse service to a prostitute" with "AWS shouldn't refuse service to Parler" or "CloudFlare shouldn't refuse service to Kiwi Farms". When people agree with the former but not the latter, what argument/principle are they using?
- 0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
  Not that I agree, but the argument might sound like "tolerate all but the intolerant."
  - LightHugger 4y ago
    Under that regime, people drawing shallow lines for who is intolerant... would be categorizeable as intolerant themselves... what a mess this is
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      Tell me you're joking. No, the "contradiction" from taking the short version literally, without even ten seconds of thought put into it, is not actually a thing. Following the rule doesn't count as intolerance to itself. Come on.
      - LightHugger 4y ago
        I feel like it's impossible to not notice it happening these-days, and the people likely not to notice are the people doing it! Of course it's a thing! It's literally everywhere! And if you're involved, stop.
  - leereeves 4y ago
    The problem with that argument is that there are many groups of people it's ok to be intolerant toward, according to the people making such judgements. A more accurate statement would be "tolerate all but people who offend certain favored groups".
_nalply 4y ago
> We won't tell you why we ban you. > We might not even tell you that you are banned. > Of course we don't tell you how we found out. This violates the human right of informational self-determination. Informational self-determination is related to privacy but has a broader scope. It includes the right to know what happens with information about oneself. In Switzerland for example one has the right to request a data dump. Well meant. But FAANG or MAMAA are not transparent about how they gain information about people and what they do with it. And they get away with it. In a way, USA resembles China in their way to social dystopia. Europe tried to fight with GDPR, but we know that went. I hope the people of the world will understand that transparency is essential. I hope they get the power to enable the human right of informational self-determination.
1letterunixname 4y ago
America has a sex problem, both in cultural puritanicalism and media exploitation (except California where adding a camera makes it "not prostitution"). Almost all of the rest of the civilized world doesn't have prostitution prohibition because it gives organized crime a revenue stream and it criminalizes behavior between consenting adults. Oh and the US doesn't have legalized abortion because body autonomy is apparently too much to ask. SCOTUS majority wants to criminalize LGBT and turn America into Gilead / ISIS where the "wicked" are pushed off buildings or hung on walls.

> The likely answer is that Airbnb used Jay’s biometric data to refine its facial-recognition technology, a practice that earlier this year landed the company in court, using a product with the potential to generate millions of dollars in revenue. > Freya didn’t use Airbnb properties for sex work, but she had her suspicions about how Airbnb flagged her. In May of 2020, before adopting cryptocurrency, she was paying for escorting advertisements with her credit card. Data sharing between platforms could have led Airbnb to algorithmically put two and two together. > Airbnb is developing a product that essentially assigns each of us a social credit score.

version_five 4y ago

The accusation is that Airbnb is using facial recognition to deny people lodging. It's a reddit link so I don't know if it's true, but if so, it seems my 2033 prediction from an hour ago is coming early. This shouldn't stand, we need proper regulation (which I can't believe I'm arguing for) to prevent companies from making their own rules like this. It's a failure of government. (If the whole thing is true, I'd want some proper confirmation. But even if it isnt, this is not the first situation like this)

thereare5lights 4y ago
meant to link to the article that the reddit post links to. sent a request to have that fixed so hopefully the link gets updated
- dang 4y ago
  Yes. Fixed now. (Submitted URL was https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zzvntv/sex_workers_have_been_banned_from_airbnb_for/ https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/zzvntv/sex_work...).
mtmail 4y ago
> It's a reddit link so I don't know if it's true, Reddit links to the source article at https://www.thenation.com/article/society/airbnb-banning-sex-workers/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/airbnb-banning-sex... > If the whole thing is true, I'd want some proper confirmation. The thenation.com article links to a court case (to be precise a complaint, so it hasn't been heard in court yet) https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-identity-verification-for-airbnb-illinois-class-action/ https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-iden...

bigjoes 4y ago

[flagged]

theCrowing 4y ago

That's a whole lot of shesaid without receipts.

thereare5lights 4y ago
> That's a whole lot of shesaid without receipts. From the article > Airbnb more or less admitted this four years earlier when it told Jay it had found her picture: How else would it have been unearthed? > Airbnb’s open admission to Freya and her partner that their accounts were suspended as a result of Freya’s sex work suggests that Airbnb, which until recently denied targeting sex workers when not avoiding the question entirely, is confident in the surveillance technology it has been refining for years.
- theCrowing 4y ago
  Still nothing...
  - thereare5lights 4y ago
    https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-identity-verification-for-airbnb-illinois-class-action/ https://classactionsreporter.com/jumio-facial-scans-for-iden...
    - theCrowing 4y ago
      That would mean that jumio and not airbnb is at fault.

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 4y ago

[flagged]

kelseyfrog 4y ago
That's just basic freedom of association. If technology provides a way to deduce association at scale, it doesn't mean that freedom of association is wrong. Take the second amendment as an example. The invention of automatic weapons doesn't invalidate the second amendment. In the same way, the creation of realtime identification and syndicated blocklists won't invalidate the freedom of association. Besides, we already deny people things based on what they do all the time. I don't go into a church and expect to be met with open arms. They wouldn't have me as I am and them and I both know it.
- smsm42 4y ago
  "It's not literally criminal" is a very poor defense. So is pretending that anybody who thinks A did something crappy is out to deny A basic freedoms to do anything. If you can't go to a concert because MegaCorp X got into a legal fight with MegaCorp Y, it's a crappy situation, and it deserves to be called as such without implying that this means you denying MegaCorp X rights to have legal fights or their right of association. You can both have rights and not use them in crappy ways. Not sure what this has to do with the second amendment... Seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    I use the second amendment as an example of an enshrined right that doesn't change when new tech develops. It's an analogy. Freedom of association doesn't change when we develop new tech either. > You can both have rights and not use them in crappy ways. And using rights in crappy ways doesn't mean we revoke them. See all the speech I disagree with and yet still support the freedom of speech. Again, I'm using an analogy here.
    - ceejayoz 4y ago

angry_octet 4y ago

I look forward to differential pricing based on every client's characteristics. Libertarians will be charged double, and have their bookings cancelled randomly just before cancelation fees become too high. People with DV charges or who don't return their shopping trolleys will be refused.

dogboxz 4y ago

How about banning the pimps and punters instead? They're the real villains, not the women they're exploiting and raping.

xeromal 4y ago
Sounds like if you ban the sex workers, the pimps and punters will have nothing to do at the airbnb so its effectively the same?
- blast 4y ago
  The article isn't really about banning the use of Airbnbs for sex work. It's about banning people who do that work from using any Airbnb at all, for any purpose.
rgoulter 4y ago
I recall seeing a post about how Sweden had banned "buying sex", but allowed "selling sex", as a way of avoiding harming women. For women who do want to sell sex, this ends up with some bad consequences. https://www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/comments/n11oqk/the_ongoing_witchhunt_for_fssw_in_sweden_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SexWorkers/comments/n11oqk/the_ongo...
yucky 4y ago
Not all prostitutes have pimps, especially in this digital age. And how did we end up with Schrödingers Hooker who is both poor oppressed victim and empowered "Yass Queen" sex worker? Also, it's not at all unreasonable for people to not want their property used as a brothel.

71a54xd 4y ago

I'm progressive and live in an east coast city - but to be honest I don't support the proliferation of sex work or the removal of social stigma. Sites like OnlyFans are really just a conduit for further exploitation and promoting the idea to other young women that selling their bodies is an acceptable form of income. It's certainly dystopian for AirBnB to target customers like this - but the government is who pioneered this kind of outsourced sleuthing. If I was a host on AirBnB the last thing I'd want is for my property to be used to shoot a porno - clearly that's the intent of AirBnB I can't really blame them here other than the way they went about doing it.

mbg721 4y ago
This issue creates some strange political bedfellows; hardcore midwestern conservatives and disconcerted coastal liberals see the sharing-economy of sex and agree that it's exploitative and bad for women.
- 71a54xd 4y ago
  I think we're slowly entering a new era of intellectual / practical honesty as a result of so much division and political grandstanding. Nuanced opinion is important - not changing what you think to fit into a cookie cutter thought group is how we understand what we really want, what progress is and who to exclude as irate grifters (on both sides of the isle). The issue of abortion also shows similar political bedfellows - even deep red states where Trump won by 20+ points during the 2016 election have vehemently upheld access to abortion.
  - mbg721 4y ago
    The abortion issue is especially weird to me, because I'm heavily emotionally invested in the Catholic extreme worldview while conservatives as a whole are not.
    - 71a54xd 4y ago
      IMO as someone who grew up in the south, I had friends in very deeply religious families who got abortions quietly. They clearly knew it was the best course of action to reduce emotional harm, a potential bad life for the child and cover for peers who would religiously shame them (ironic - I know).

Overtonwindow 4y ago

This is a double edge sword. She should be allowed to use the service, without question, but Airbnb is right to be concerned properties might be used for prostitution. Airbnb does not trust sex workers.

rmk 4y ago

Why is it surprising or out of place? How is this different from hotels that will not rent out rooms to prostitutes, even if they are not 'working'? I imagine it must be burdensome to AirBnB to distinguish the two scenarios, and it will likely ruin their reputation, same as drug dealing out of hotel rooms or airbnb properties would. If hotel chains have these databases of sex workers in their workers heads' (hotel managers presumably have lists or can recognize sex workers by sight), then why can't AirBnB build a database or use facial recognition to do the same thing? And hotels are not denying Muslims access to bookings, so why imply that AirBnB would/could? I'm trying to understand how AirBnB, which necessarily has to rely on technology to perform these functions (that hotels already do via their employees) is such a threat.

josephcsible 4y ago

Compare the position "Airbnb shouldn't refuse service to a prostitute" with "AWS shouldn't refuse service to Parler" or "CloudFlare shouldn't refuse service to Kiwi Farms". When people agree with the former but not the latter, what argument/principle are they using?

0cVlTeIATBs 4y ago
Not that I agree, but the argument might sound like "tolerate all but the intolerant."
- LightHugger 4y ago
  Under that regime, people drawing shallow lines for who is intolerant... would be categorizeable as intolerant themselves... what a mess this is
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    Tell me you're joking. No, the "contradiction" from taking the short version literally, without even ten seconds of thought put into it, is not actually a thing. Following the rule doesn't count as intolerance to itself. Come on.
    - LightHugger 4y ago
      I feel like it's impossible to not notice it happening these-days, and the people likely not to notice are the people doing it! Of course it's a thing! It's literally everywhere! And if you're involved, stop.
- leereeves 4y ago
  The problem with that argument is that there are many groups of people it's ok to be intolerant toward, according to the people making such judgements. A more accurate statement would be "tolerate all but people who offend certain favored groups".

_nalply 4y ago

> We won't tell you why we ban you. > We might not even tell you that you are banned. > Of course we don't tell you how we found out. This violates the human right of informational self-determination. Informational self-determination is related to privacy but has a broader scope. It includes the right to know what happens with information about oneself. In Switzerland for example one has the right to request a data dump. Well meant. But FAANG or MAMAA are not transparent about how they gain information about people and what they do with it. And they get away with it. In a way, USA resembles China in their way to social dystopia. Europe tried to fight with GDPR, but we know that went. I hope the people of the world will understand that transparency is essential. I hope they get the power to enable the human right of informational self-determination.

1letterunixname 4y ago

America has a sex problem, both in cultural puritanicalism and media exploitation (except California where adding a camera makes it "not prostitution"). Almost all of the rest of the civilized world doesn't have prostitution prohibition because it gives organized crime a revenue stream and it criminalizes behavior between consenting adults. Oh and the US doesn't have legalized abortion because body autonomy is apparently too much to ask. SCOTUS majority wants to criminalize LGBT and turn America into Gilead / ISIS where the "wicked" are pushed off buildings or hung on walls.