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Airbnb has a hidden camera problem

theatlantic.com

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Re: Airbnb has a hidden camera problem

#3

Post by Hackbraten »

This is extremely disturbing.

The author may have cherry-picked a few extreme examples, and a majority of Airbnb bookings may go smoothly. Nonetheless, after reading that article, I’ll probably not use Airbnb ever again. FUD can be an irrational beast.

Re: Airbnb has a hidden camera problem

#4

Post by hadsed »

Say what you want about Facebook, but at least they put an incredible amount of resources into hiring humans to deal with their problems that require good human judgment. They can of course do this because they basically print money. What about companies who operate on thin margins like Uber and Airbnb? (Uber at some point had been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on customer support, to their credit.)

It seems that regulation is the only way to force investment into mitigating these externalities for their customers.

Re: Airbnb has a hidden camera problem

#7

Post by mi100hael »

jamestimmins wrote: post #6

The article mentions Nmap as a way of identifying cameras on the network. Does anyone know how robust of a solution this is, or if there are other ways of ensuring that any cameras are found?

Nmap can run a scan to find devices on the same network as your computer. It's fairly robust at detecting/identifying networked hosts. It won't find cameras that only record offline to a memory card and it won't find cameras that are on a different network (like if you're on a special guest network).

Edit: for example, my home network has an IP cam. So when I run the following to scan my home subnet:

    nmap 10.0.0.0/24
I get an output that includes:

    Nmap scan report for ipcam_00626E4E5B97_1.local (10.0.0.50)
    Host is up (0.023s latency).
    Not shown: 999 closed ports
    PORT   STATE SERVICE
    80/tcp open  http
From that I can deduce that 10.0.0.50 is a camera and serving some sort of management web page.

Re: Airbnb has a hidden camera problem

#8

Post by overwhelm »

TheBeardKing wrote: post #5

Airbnb allows cameras in living rooms as long as they're disclosed? I sure hope that disclosure is extremely prominent to make sure I never book one. I can't believe they allow that.

Starting in early 2018, Airbnb added another layer of disclosure: If hosts indicate they have cameras anywhere on their property, guests receive a pop-up informing them where the cameras are located and where they are aimed. To book the property, the guests must click “agree,” indicating that they’re aware of the cameras and consent to being filmed.
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