My home was burglarized once and among all the serious stuff that they took they also took: tortillas, salsa, ground beef, and cheddar cheese. I still can't believe that.
No seriously. Excellent stunt for getting out of a crazy credit card bill from Bed, Bath and Beyond. Didn't we see this movie before? What was it.. Fight Club?
Yep, when I was burgled, alongside a MacBook, watch and my freakin' backups, which were on a separate drive on a nearby bookcase, they also took some bath soap and a bottle of dessert wine that my gf and I brought back from France specially. I hope they choked on the wine.
That said, I also had they keys to brand new Audi on the kitchen counter (I used to be a car journalist and it was a press test car) and they completely missed them. So, I got off lightly, in some respects, even if the loss of backups is still something that pisses me off today.
I've learned my mistake about backup drives now and do it over wifi to a drive in secret location witheld.
I can definitely sympathise. MacBook and backup drives containing all my photos and music taken from a bookshelf. I foolishly thought it would never happen. Needless to say I now have offsite backups but it's a horrid lesson to learn. DONT take it for granted - a service like backblaze might be the best $5 you ever spend.
Oh, and they took a bottle of vodka that was 3/4 empty. These scumbags do weird things.
From someone who had building burn down: back up to offsite locations, ideally off-state, ideally off-continent, over the Internet, and CHECK YOUR RESTORE PROCEDURE PERIODICALLY. A wifi backup to a time capsule hidden up in the rafters (digital rat line!) isn't going to help you if crackheads break in...and then burn your place down with an errant crackpipe.
(also, envy on the car journalism; being an equipment reviewer for stuff you really love, like cars, guns, scuba gear, computer gear, headphones, etc., would be a really fun paid hobby)
Yeah, offsite is the way to go, I think. We're due to get fibre broadband here in December, and that's when the whole lot will go up to S3 monthly if not weekly.
That said, I guess I'm talking about ~2TB of stuff (work data and personal data) -- wasn't there a thread somewhere that discussed the various options? I'm in the UK, rather than the US, and would rather keep my data in the EU
I tried to use Carbonite. Nice UI, simple service. But with Comcast it was going to take about 3 months to back up 400GB -- and that was with leaving my laptop on 24/7.
To this day I'm not sure if it was Comcast or Carbonite that made the uploads so slow, but I've since had to rethink my offsite back up plans. Would love suggestions.
I use comcast business at home, and use crashplan pro for our laptop and Linux server backups.
The initial backup of my laptop (200gb since I included iTunes mp3 and 2 x 25gb vmware images) took a couple days when idle. After that the incrementals were basically unnoticed.
The internet backup option isn't really feasible for a normal home connection. With the Comcast 250gb monthly quota it would take me half a year to get all my data up.
The first time my home was robbed (while I was sleeping upstairs), the perpetrators did a whole bunch of bizarre things, like taking a jar of pickles out of the fridge and leaving them on the front porch and taking the laundry detergent from our laundry room and pouring it out in the back yard.
In an unrelated story, I happened to be moving out of that apartment the same day. And the very next day my new apartment also got robbed.
First time I got robbed, they took my CD player, moved my stack of CDs, but left them all there! Way to insult my music tastes.
They also stole my dinner suit. Which I had bought the week before, worn to a party, soaked with my dance sweat, and not yet cleaned. Insurance repaid me the full value of the suit, so essentially I got a "free suit rental" out of the experience.
(Plus the cost of new bars on all my windows. And the experience six months later of, presumably, interrupting the same guy trying to climb in my bathroom window at dinner time. Thankfully he never returned after that.)
As a kid, I lost an Atari Lynx to burglars, but I still feel sad about it. Last laugh was on them though, as they left the battery pack. NICE 1.5 HOUR BATTERY LIFE, YOU SCUM.
Yeah. The one time I used it, my brother sent a phtocopy of his driver's license to the apartment owner and she sent him the keys in the mail. I was a little nervous about it all working out, but all the hotels in the area were booked or were $600+/night. It ended up being a pretty good experience for us, but it did require both sides to be pretty trusting.
How is that relevant? Apart from the fact that valuables were locked in, I don't get the point:
- You cannot take everything with you, you have to leave stuff at your _home_ (all the documents mentioned for example).
- I won't try to claim that I can speak for the author, but I'd guess that the valuables lost are less a problem. The violation/emotional troubles seem to be worse.
- Giving the nature of the destruction (it seems so much on purpose, so carefully done) I don't even know if 'did not meet them in person first' would've helped. At least the author would recognize these guys again on the street, but I don't believe that it is proven that you would've sensed something that wrong.. It kind of reads like someone enjoyed a dark fetish by destroying random stuff.
You cannot take everything with you, you have to leave stuff at your _home_ (all the documents mentioned for example).
In light of this article, if I ever rented my apartment out for a week, I would box up any sensitive documents, or particularly valuable items, and leave them at a friend's house.
I don't even know if 'did not meet them in person first' would've helped.
Getting a scan of a photo ID, matching it to the person, and possibly getting a current photo of them, along with a license plate number all would be reasonable measures that you could take in a five minute meeting. Not only would they give you more leverage in police investigations, they would probably deter people from trashing/taking your stuff.
The violation/emotional troubles seem to be worse.
Some of the violation comes from the feeling that she can't really do very much about it, and that she was totally unprepared for it. AirBnB offering a few tips, of the "here are some things people to do protect themselves, you might consider them" variety, seems totally reasonable.
How is that not relevant? I used craigslist to sell a car recently and with strangers showing up asking for solo test drives, the least I could do was ask for a valid license so I could make a copy and a cell phone number, which I verified on the spot. That or no solo test drive. True in extreme cases this would not have stopped my car getting stolen, but I cannot imagine leaving a house full of personal documents and valuables to a stranger whose sex and last name I did not even know. You can tell a lot from meeting someone in person, at least enough to raise red flags or some doubt and maybe have a neighbor check in from time to time.I think airbnb and the internet in general lull some otherwise smart, educated people into a false sense of security they wouldn't have offline but people need to use just as much commonsense online as they would in the real world.
How could you, in principle, even tell that it was the bnb'ers who did it? What's to say that they didn't accidentally leave the door unlocked when they left, and someone else broke in?
I am non-representatively paranoid, and have always been afraid of this kind of thing when having guests not personally known to me, visitors to "open house" office events, etc. I think there is little actual risk with almost anyone as a guest (most people ARE good, or at least non-malicious, or at least lazy), but this is why the AirBnB reputation system is so key to their value (and why they'll have a strong network effect).
Maybe the effect of this will be to make people want personal connections (via fb graph or whatever) to their AirBnB guests, or at least requiring minimum numbers of positive reviews from known sources (to prevent the sockpuppet/shill issue).
I wonder if your renter's or homeowners insurance might cover this kind of thing. If it doesn't generally, it'd be awesome if AirBnB could work with a third party insurer (per jurisdiction) to offer optional insurance to hosts (and guests) against this kind of thing.
It'd be awesomer if AirBnB just replaced all the material things that are replaceable, relocated this person, and in general made them feel happy/safe again. One time only, introduce a better model to prevent/mitigate/insure (as you suggest) for future occurrences.
I suspect home owner's insurance would not cover this since they would probably see it as an unlicensed rental. I've thought for a while that Airbnb will need to develop an insurance system. I'm sure that lesser incidents of property destruction / theft are far more commonplace (carpet stains, cigarette burns, appliances damaged, "borrowing" something that doesn't get returned) and I've thought dealing with such is going to be eventually crucial to making the model sustainable over time.
And then, of course, there are going to be rare catastrophes like this one -- or worse. Eventually, if the system gets large enough, there will be a sexual assault case. I wonder if Airbnb has pre-baked disaster scenario plans. Eventually they'll have to deal with the emotional, PR, legal and political fallout.
It's still one of the things that keeps me queasy about listing my extra bedroom. I'd guesstimate the replacement value of the contents of my apartment is circa $50k and I'm loathe to gamble with such.
I'd be more worried about a guest setting the house on fire, by accident or not. Fire-damage can easily clock in north of $500k. Good luck explaining the AirBnB concept to your insurance company after a stranger turns out to be "not available anymore" (stolen CC, etc.).
A thousand times, yes. You'd be insane not to carry at least a half million dollars in coverage for fire loss in a city like San Francisco. I think my own rental insurance covers something like $1M, and they explicitly don't cover losses incurred to property that I'm renting to others. That's another class of insurance -- much more expensive, because the risks are so much higher.
I think you have to be incredibly naive to rent out your personal apartment on AirBnB. The downside risk is virtually unbounded (and lest you think I'm exaggerating: what happens if a tweaker AirBnB renter burns down your building, and your neighbors die in the fire? Hello, civil judgment.)
I hate that the author broke out the short skirt rape thing. I don't think someone that leaves their house to strangers while they go out of town for a week is quite as innocent as a rape victim that was targeted for lack of modesty.
Right, but it's bad taste to equate a short skirt with letting someone you've never met live in your house completely unattended for a week. Most people have the sense to understand that that is a dangerous idea. I don't endorse either ransacking or rape, and I recognize that there was a crime that was committed here and that the victim is still a victim. But I think comparing that to comments that a woman "deserved" to be raped because of her attire is over the line and insensitive to rape victims.
I only criticized your choice of words: "I don't think someone that leaves their house [...] is quite as _innocent_ [...]" implies that this somehow makes them guilty.
I believe that both the homeowner and the figurative rape victim are equally innocent.
The word innocent also refers to childlike innocence, or an innocent mistake just as "loss of innocence" doesn't mean "becoming guilty" (at least not in a legal sense).
It is a difficult situation...on the one. hand you can't blame victims for crimes. That responsibility lies 100% with the criminals.
On the other hand, in some cases someone is negligent in taking some easy precautions; and it's hard not to comment on it. I think that's important too. As others have noted this sort of thing is inevitable, and I think it's productive to talk about ways to possibly mitigate it.
AirBnB was certainly negligent, and I understand the rationale at the time and why she was trusting can appreciate it....but still some common sense precautions like asking the neighbors/friends to check in on your renters and inspect the property could have prevented some of this.
Hindsight is 20/20 and who knows how things would go...maybe no precautions could have prevented this. However I think for the sake of people who may be in a similar situation, it's important to talk about ways to protect yourself.
The problem with the meme about "short skirt = rape" is not that it's completely without truth...the problem is that cases where a victim was actually negligent (to an appreciable extent) are exceptionally rare (say, they decided to go visit an ex boyfriend they knew to be violently insane who told them he would hurt them if he ever saw them again)...and even in such an exceptionally rare case rape apologists reach the wrong conclusions based on that.
The topic is so sticky, I feel compelled to repeat myself. Victims are never to blame for the crimes, criminals are.... However as I believe in learning lessons from mistakes, I would feel compelled to think to myself that if you have an ex-boyfriend who is violently insane you should communicate though court orders, the police, or at least a telephone.
That brings up another important distinction: it's not likely that others will be dating one's crazy ex-boyfriend...so there's not much need to have a discussion about possible ways of dealing with said ex-boyfriend.
No person could really expect getting raped to be a reasonable outcome for wearing a short-skirt/walking alone. It's theoretically possible...so are so many other things that it's not practical to think of or try to avoid them all.
The casual link between wearing a dress/walking alone and getting raped/attacked is much more tenuous (well really it's completely non-existent) than the link between opening your home to a stranger for a week without meeting them face to face or taking various other precautions.
Most people could be reasonably expect problems from just handing over your keys to someone, even if it's just having your towels stolen...and everyone who is considering it should be beaten over the head with that fact and do as much as they can to mitigate that risk.
This woman has a point that AirBnB was remiss in reminding her, they have that responsibility. She also has a responsibility herself to take precautions, but that does not negate AirBnB's...I also think she is completely aware at this point in where she failed....but for the sake of others reading the story who might face similar risks, I think it's worth-while to discuss it.
Also, I somewhat agree with the grand-parent that the way the woman in the article compares telling a woman to not wear a skirt in order to avoid rape with talking/thinking about ways she might have avoided the ordeal is not an entirely accurate comparison...though considering what she's been through if I were talking to her personally I probably wouldn't press the point. She's already learned her lesson, the discussion is only worthwhile to have for observers.
> I don't think someone that leaves their house to strangers while they go out of town for a week is quite as innocent as a rape victim that was targeted for lack of modesty.
Actually the evidence is the other way: women who wear modest clothing are more likely to get raped than those who wear sexy clothing. This is because rapists see modest clothing as a sign of submissiveness and are more likely to assault women they see as submissive. http://clubtroppo.com.au/2011/05/17/does-provocative-clothin...
"... emphasize that the customer service team at airbnb.com has been wonderful..."
reconcilable with this:
"...My next call was to airbnb.com - I tried their "urgent" line, their email address, their general customer support line. I heard nothing - no response whatsoever - until the following day, 14 sleepless hours later, and only after a desperate call to an airbnb.com freelancer I happen to know helped my case get some attention..."
Does that mean you'd have to know someone who works at AirBnB before you can get customer service? I've heard similar stories about Google, too.
It is unfortunate that stories like that could really harm AirBnB's reputation. I am sure that there are plenty of vacation rental stories of people trashing and burglarizing properties, but the difference is that this was not a vacation rental. I hope that thieves do not make a trend of preying on AirBnB hosts to gain access to their private residences.
AirBnB's policy of "disallowing the exchange of personal contact information until the point in which a reservation is already confirmed and paid for" seems like it makes this kind of story inevitable.
Not really. Often copies or stolen birth certificates, SS cards, and passports are sold to forgers that can use them to make fake passports and identities. So it isn't to necessarily impersonate you (although it can be used for that).
You can get a new SS number, and you can get a new passport which makes the old ones null - but as far as a birth certificate goes - I'm not too privy on the security features of those documents. I do know though that they are rarely used to impersonate and more often used as forgery material.
This is not the first story like this I have heard about AirBnB. They have just done a good job keeping them hush hush and talking people out of going to the cops. Obviously stories like this are horrible for their reputation and AirBnB have a big incentive to try and take care of issues on their own.
What in the world do they offer hosts to keep them from going to the police? And what kind of host would contact AirBNB before calling the police? If I came home and my apartment was ransacked, I'd probably be on the phone to 911 before I even set foot inside.
I always found AirBnB's model based on a surprising amount of trust - I for one would never be comfortable just handing over they keys to my place to a total stranger.
Even if they didn't ransack my place completely, as happened to the unfortunate author - I would be concerned about unintentional damage to my property that I might not discover till too late. Renting out something as private as my primary place of residence just seems like a generally bad idea, especially when I am not around to constantly check in on it. Even if I got to meet them, and they seemed like nice people whats to stop them from leaving without paying if they accidentally broke my TV ?
As the service expands, and becomes more craigslist-y (in terms of audience) I can only see problems like this getting worse, and apart from implementing some kind of guest / host rating system (like ecommerce portals do with sellers) I see no clear solution to the problem.
Same here. I'd be more than willing to use the service as a customer, but as a host? Never. If you're a customer the worst of the worst than can happen is you lose the rental fee and have to find a hotel. As a host, the worst that can happen is this.
Everything in life carries risks. Trusting strangers is nice. I'd rather live in a world where I can. Then again I live in a place where people leave their cars unlocked.
Sure, but the whole premise is that you're traveling. Going to unknown territories.
If I'm going traveling, I'm sure as hell in "untrusting" mode since I don't have a clue what the locals are like.
There's strangers as in "local resident I see each day but don't know", and there's strangers as in "I've just traveled to a completely different country and have no clue who this person is"
Wanting to trust everyone and believing majority of people are good is a nice hippy dream. There's some nasty horrible people out there.
This family bicycled 26,000 miles over 43 months and didn't run into a single one of those nasty horrible people. Maybe they were extremely lucky, but I like to think you can't live your life worrying about the few nasty horrible people.
A woman hitchhiked through the middle east dressed as a bride to promote world peace and was murdered and raped.
Are either of these anecdotes indicative of people's experiences when travelling? No. Is there potential danger in relying heavily on stranger's good intentions? Perhaps.
People generally don't like outliers. If not-so-decent people see someone not like them (probably noticeably better), they would have a natural desire to make them harm. At least of envy.
Bullshit. Live in fear of strangers your whole life or trust the basic humanity of strangers. Either way you're still going to die of heart disease like the rest of us. Why don't you live in constant fear of that?
Stranger danger is a result of a fear-mongering media. Are you seriously worried about serial killers? Do you know how few of them there are and how freaking many people there are in the world?
People love to live in fear of things like strangers because it's immediate and controllable. They can just choose to stay away from them. It gives people a sense of control. Heart disease is long-term and amorphous. It's harder to gain immediate relief from fear of that.
By all means, don't leave a bunch of cash around while staying at a stranger's house. Take reasonable precautions. But fearing people by default is irrational.
I also believe it is much worth to live with a strong faith in the good nature of people.
However I believe one should not indulge in it.
This faith is very precious and this is exactly why it is a sin to rely upon it in the wrong circumstances.
I live in Japan, that has a very low crime rate, but I found it very interesting when they told me "Don't leave anything valuable at the office. There is very little chance that something might happen, but can you imagine how you will feel and act towards your colleagues if something happens..."
What you value you must protect. Although it sounds controversial, this means that it is your obligation to protect your faith to the goodness of people from the ones that could destroy it.
Strawman. I don't live in fear of strangers. They don't haunt my dreams or make me break out in cold sweat or make me stop going places. But I keep my eye out, because I am not stupidly naive about it.
It's not as irrational as you think, either. The majority of people are decent, or society wouldn't exist at all. However, the non-decent ones tend to seek out travelers and other people who can be victimized. This is why the best advice to give to your kids is that they can probably trust anyone they walk up to if they have a serious problem, but anyone who approaches them for anything out-of-the-ordinary should probably be treated with great skepticism. Statistically speaking there are many situations, such as traveling, where you are disproportionately likely to encounter the non-decent types. Ignore this fact at your own peril.
Me too (live in a place where cars go unlocked), but last night I watched a burglar open my passenger door, sit in the seat and look around. I never put valuables in that car, so I wasn't concerned if only for the awareness that my neighborhood is not as safe as I once thought. I shouted at him from my second-story window and he took off like a bat out of hell. The cops came and I now lock the doors on my beater every day.
A guest can only needs to steal credit card details to attack the host. The host needs to steal a whole house. That might be possible (through, say, AirBnB), but I doubt it would be easy.
Agreed, though I see a lot of people using AirBNB for guesthouses, rooms in their house (where they'll at least be at the place), or investment houses. Those scenarios seem less risky.
As the service expands, regular people's homes (with unrestorable personal value and charm) will be replaced with commercial properties using airBnB as just another advertising channel. When that happens the fresh appeal will be gone and airBnB will be successful if they have become popular and stable enough that an airBnB listing is mandatory for people in the property management business.
The risk/reward trade-offs don't seem to be understood by most AirBnB landlords (99.99% chance of earning $100, 0.01% chance of losing $50k+). Even though this is strongly positive expected value, for a family that can't afford to lose $50k this is a game of russian roulette.
My heart goes out to the author of this; I hope the person who did this to her is put in jail, and the system (AirBnB) that enabled that person prevents landlords who can't afford the financial & emotional risk from listing properties going forward.
This is one those places where laws make sense to me; the average person needs to be protected from unknowingly gambling with their family's future.
Why don't you start a business that offers competitive insurance packages to people who want to use airBnB (and similar products) instead of demanding a law that obviously would have a lot of unwanted side effects on people who _do_ know about the risks they are taking by entering this business?
Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing pros and cons of said laws.
Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured.
There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whether they should insure their property than lawmakers and thus it should be up to them (again: as long as their property doesn't have a high probability of damaging other people; in such cases mandatory insurance might be reasonable).
It's very easy for younger smart people to be anarcho-capitalists (which I take it you are), but IMHO becomes progressively harder as you age.
The basic problem is that a "people know what's best for themselves" policy screws over dumb people for the simple reason that they don't.
Car insurance is a very interesting thing to legislate, because although the expected value of buying insurance is slightly negative, when you factor in the economies of scale on dealing with someone else's car getting repaired (figuring out if a bill is over market, handling multiple bills, tracking any medical expenses, etc), purchasing car insurance is strongly positive EV.
I think landlord insurance is similar.
>> Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
Landlord insurance of course also covers this (if your property catches fire while you're renting it out, you may very well be legally responsible, if a previous renter breaks in and steals the new renters belongings you are probably legally responsible, etc).
Regardless, it seems based on what you said that you might be in favor of requiring renters to buy insurance. Is this correct?
No.
I wasn't even making an argument for mandatory car insurance. I was merely pointing out the difference to mandatory property insurance and said that this difference _might_ be the basis for a convincing argument in favor of the former.
Rental property insurance is not a brand new idea.
Probably not worth to be codified as a law, after all, some may choose to bypass it, but other than that there are plenty of companies selling it (vacation properties and rentals existed long before AirBnB), and AirBnB could benefit from linking to those vendors.
Of course.
I didn't mean to say that she/he should actually start an insurance company. I wanted to point out that there are market-incentives that might motivate someone to offer such a service without the need for a law.
That split seems wrong. There seems to be no deterrent to the type of behavior the author experienced, so it would seem that everyone with an inkling will try to steal the renter's identity. I'd estimate that population to be 1-3% of people, which implies the expected value is strongly negative
I think you are dramatically overstating the risk at 0.01%. Suppose past performance predicts future results. AirBnB has had, what, 10 million rental deals? And this has only happened, as far as we can tell, once. That's not an 0.01% risk. It's more like 0.000001%.
Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.
It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.
Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?
Update: Airbnb's new post http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/on-safety-a-word-from-airbn... says "undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good." If I take that to mean that 2 million nights had been booked via Airbnb to date, then I underestimated the (frequentist) risk by a factor of around 350: 2 million nights are only a quarter of a million weeks, so this is a one-in-a-quarter-million chance, 0.00035% rather than 0.000001%. Also, my original figure, "It's more like 0.000001%," was wrong; that would have been one in a hundred million, not one in ten million. And the original "0.01%" was an overestimate by only about a factor of 300, not ten thousand.
So the risk of this happening to you is not like the risk of dying by traveling 20 kilometers by car, but more like the risk of dying by traveling 700 kilometers by car.
(Of course that's assuming that past performance is some kind of a guide to future results. It could be that all kinds of tweakers are going to get on Airbnb now and trash things that one of their friends has had a taste, or it could be that future people thinking of doing this kind of thing will be deterred by the rapid arrest of the apparent culprit in this case.)
> As the service expands, regular people's homes (with unrestorable personal value and charm) will be replaced with commercial properties using airBnB as just another advertising channel.
This could happen (especially if people get scared off by one-in-a-million crimes like this one) but it isn't economically rational. The marginal cost of having someone stay in your spare bedroom is often very small, even negative. This is never the case for commercial hotels.
I would go as far as to say that commercial hotels only exist at all because of an information deficiency: on the traveler's side, about the available spare bedrooms, and on the host's side, about the trustworthiness of the traveler. (Except in exceptional cases, say, Gualeguaychú, which has enormous tourism, dwarfing the city's population for a few weeks a year, and nothing the rest of the time. But I still stayed in a spare room with some random family I met on the street when I went there for Carnaval, not in a hotel.)
It occurs to me that the people with the strongest incentives to trash someone's apartment like this would be hotel owners and managers. Many of them might not be willing or able to do it themselves, but they could certainly hire someone else.
AirBnB already has a host rating system, but because of no set level of expectations pretty much everybody gets 5 stars. Hotels are easier to rate in that regard, and people have no qualms leaving lower ratings if they don't see extra towels, have to sit in uncomfortable chairs, or are charged $14.99 for wireless Internet.
Guest rating system is even harder, as unless you're hardcore traveler, your use of AirBnB might be limited to once or twice a year. This would also penalize any new user to the service.
Was this a total stranger? It would make a lot more sense to me if it was an ex-lover or people put up to it by an ex-lover or otherwise someone with a personal vendetta.
AirBnB can be used without issues if you own a property and you're willing to operate it like a hotel: you're present on the premises to check in the guests, you have a room or a reception-like place from where you can monitor the situation, and you're able to inspect the place when they leave.
Operating a property remotely via AirBnB implies all sorts of risks, which makes me think that it might be an unsustainable model, because a black swan event might ruin the property to such extent that it offsets the income made in all the other cases.
AirBnB handles property promotion and property booking on the Internet -- that's fine -- but when it advertised itself it included in the message ways to do property administration (as in rent-your-home-while-away). While this is not connected intricately with their core business, it is the model that some owners assumed by default, without realizing the risks involved or the fact that you are still exposed to one-in-one-hundred unpleasant events.
If they manage to warn about this upfront similar to the way Craiglist does, without losing their brand and their community support, then owners will become aware of those issues and take the necessary protection (by i.e. requesting guarantees/deposits/passports or by using their social network to validate the guests). If they don't, I'm afraid a couple of bad PR articles will be enough to destroy their reputation.
P.S.: I haven't heard of hotels managed remotely; there are some hotels where you check in automatically and you get the keys via some sort of robot system but in the morning there is someone handling the checkout, the cleaning etc. In addition they have your credit card on file, your passport, probably your cam photo when you picked up the keys and the most you can destroy is a hotel room (still a great deal of value but somehow limited and the hotel probably has insurance for it). But automation didn't pick up at scale in the hotel industry. In the current state, it thrives partially because the reception provides the safety-checks and balances needed to prevent and offset these black swan events. I'm not sure the remote administration model is scalable or even manage-able due to this.
Um, this is incorrect. Hotels are vandalized all the time... having a "reception-like place from where you can monitor the situation", and "inspect[ing] the place when they leave" doesn't prevent people from trashing your room/apt.
It sounds like the person who trashed the OP's apartment /enjoyed/ trashing it -- it didn't sound like someone inconsiderate, or in a hurry; it sounded like someone who deliberately and knowingly ruined the place. The security measures you suggest won't stop that sort of attacker.
I've said "to prevent and offset". It's about managing the event (offsetting the bad cases when prevention fails). Having a reception area allows you to have their signature on the contract, to validate their identity (name, nationality, passport) based on the photo ID and how they look in real life and to have on record a lot of validated information about them (which will sure help with police and insurance in case something bad happens).
I agree identity validation, and being there to hear loud noises/odd behavior makes it harder / less fun for an attacker -- but this is not what allows hotels to operate effectively. Some percentage of hotel registrations surely occur with stolen passports, etc. Hotels rather build this cost into their business model in a manner similar to an insurance company.
Because hotels rent so many rooms at a time, they can treat these costs in the same way that your car insurance company treats accident risk -- something that is always happening that can be offset in real time by honest people using the hotel as per the contract.
Letting people into your home does not have that risk-sharing property -- it's insuring a single driver instead of tens of thousands -- you open yourself up to a very real risk of losing a lot of money.
(Not to mention that hotels are not personally attached to the rental rooms).
But if you have their passport and secured their credit card info, you can report them to the police, and perhaps keep them from leaving the country if the place was trashed totally (ie burned down the building maliciously)
>Um, this is incorrect. Hotels are vandalized all the time...
that is the point why they take down your credit card data before giving you the keys. Your vandalizing after that is just an entertainment your card will be charged for.
>The security measures you suggest won't stop that sort of attacker.
so you think the attacker has perfect credit history and there is absolutely no sense in checking it?
I'd expect they used a stolen card (or a stolen card number, more likely). There's almost no way anyone could be stupid enough to do that with their own card.
Or a prepaid debit card (do those work with airbnb)?
The interesting thing will be the gmail account's IP history. I suspect SFPD will get the IP history and I hope this DJ Pattrson logged in from an identifiable location (or that the phone number, presumably a prepaid, is linkable to location and identity somehow).
SFPD is one of the better police forces to have to work with on this; I'd sure rather be dealing with them than Oakland or various other East Bay police forces. You might also want to involve REACT (http://www.reacttf.org/), the Silicon Valley (incl SF) high tech crime task force. They'll be good at tracking someone down through online identity, compared to local police.
I wonder if AirBnB has offered the host/victim some AirBnB credit to stay elsewhere while her place is being de-trashed.
You're giving thieves and vandals far too much credit. For most, if they had the intelligence to get away with the crime, then they'd have the intelligence to know not to commit it.
Well the solution there is not to accept a credit card as a form of identification.
I check into lots of hotels and about 50% of the time they require an actual government-issued photo ID; I assume for room-trashing situations and the probably more-common situation where somebody racks up a huge bill and then steals away in the middle of the night leaving nothing but a stolen CC number.
It's a lot more difficult, and the legal penalties are much steeper, for forging a government-issued identity document than for using a prepaid credit card with a false name on it.
I actually feel a lot more comfortable "harshly using" (not really vandalizing, but making full use of) a hotel than someone's airbnb, couchsurfing, or friendly couchsurfing arrangement -- because it's an impersonal commercial space, I'll use all the water I want, leave wet towels all over, etc., whereas at airbnb I feel like I should be even more polite and neat than I would be in my own home.
Interesting point -- I wonder if people who enjoy breaking things are more likely to use AirBnB, since they're destroying something that really matters to someone.
A hotel is likely to have CCTV in the lobby, full time security, contacts with local police and lots of institutional experience dealing with disruptive guests. All things that the average part-time innkeeper doesn't have.
I haven't use AirBnB before, but I do use CouchSurfing a lot. CouchSurfing's system of verification, vouching and references makes a big difference to how much you feel you can trust someone who asks to use your home. I do still sometimes accept guests with no references, particularly if it's a last minute, but I check their IDs first, and only give them limited access to my home.
It's yet another tragedy of the commons. As AirBNB becomes more popular I expect this is going to happen more often. Unfortunately I think this is only going to have to happen a few more times before people start to seriously question the wisdom of inviting a relative stranger into their homes.
Exactly this. A service thorougly tested with (for want of a better term) early-adopter Internet hipsters is going to fail in entirely predictable ways when exposed to the Internet that gave us 4chan.
That's what I would do. I once got a letter from my management company that said, "we are conducting random apartment inspections tomorrow. be aware." This bothered me because I don't really like people in my house, and they didn't give the 24 hours notice required by law. So, I set up some cameras, broadcast it to the Internet, and told my twitter followers to watch my apartment for me while I was at work.
Yes and no. There are also situations where state inspectors can come into your bought house: building structural safety inspection, fire safety, pest control etc... It also depends on where you live, of course.
Sorry for you.But,this post has brought to light some serious loopholes with Airbnb. Now its up to them to come up with a fix for these kind of issues not to repeat. Probably they need to do some background checks,referrals,FB connections,SSNs etc. Its a lesson for any host also to ensure that they keep their personal things safe before renting it out.
This sort of thing is bound to happen when you have helped over 1 million stays between two people who are usually strangers. I think what's more impressive is how long it took for something this big and this public to happen. Human beings act in strange ways and you take a risk anytime you interact with one. I feel awful that this happened to this woman but I don't think it means Airbnb has a flawed business model or needs to dramatically change the way they sign up users.
Simple - first time users submit scan of a photo ID, and a picture of themselves. AirBnB checks the ID, and publishes the photo. After booking, the owner can use Skype to see if they match the photo.
Great idea! However, AirBnB should not only post the photo, but also be in charge of verifying over Skype that it matches the person posting it. If it'd be too expensive to verify every single new user, they could just verify them once they make their first booking.
AirBnB should be the one matching photos to real, living individuals since not everyone renting out their home is likely to be as through as a company with a well-established procedure.
What happened to this person is awful and it´s understandable that she/he is very emotional at this point, but I don´t think the lesson is you can´t ever trust people, or that the AirBnB model is flawed. It´s more like: hope for the best, plan for the worst. There is always going to be some black swan risk even if AirBnB does do more vetting. There´s no reason for example to leave valuables anywhere in the residence while strangers are there. You can´t be 100% protected unless you´re willing to get insurance, which probably doesn´t make sense for the occasional provider, but you can at least remove the low hanging fruit risk-wise. Perhaps AirBnB should take a more active role in educating its providers on basic precautions.
> There´s no reason for example to leave valuables anywhere in the residence while strangers are there.
So you're saying AirBnB should advocate against rentals while you're away?
Or are you saying, if you want to rent while you're gone for a week, that you should get a week's worth of self-storage (which I've never heard of, but might exist in a city), move all your important belongings to the self-storage unit, and move them back after the guest is gone? That seems quite onerous.
That or drop them with a friend or relative. Why is that so onerous?
I think people should use AirBnB however they see fit, but understand the risks in doing so and take whatever precautions are realistic to lessen them.
This situation would still suck, but not be nearly as bad/scary/expensive if the victim hadn't left cash, credit cards, expensive electronics, legal documents etc. in the apartment. I'm just recommending easy steps to lower the potential downside and increase the overall EV of being an AirBnB provider given that this sort of nightmare is a slight but real possibility.
The guests sound like drug addicts. (Maybe meth? Tweakers do bizarre things like move furniture at odd hours or burn fires without opening the flue.)
I've been a happy AirBnb guest on a few occasions; the one time I had someone's whole usual studio apartment I found it a bit strange how much of their life was left on display for me – like the host's prescriptions still in the fridge! – but of course respected their privacy.
Each time I've been a guest, we've seen photos of each other on the site, and the keys were handed off in person. While I didn't expect anyone to stop by and check on me during my stays, I always had the impression the host or host's friends were nearby.
A guest with criminal intent would try to pick a place for a longer stay, in a more anonymous building, with a host known to be out-of-town. But then again, that's also what someone seeking to burglarize any vacation-emptied residence would do. More or less this same sort of crime could happen without AirBnb, or perhaps be enabled by nothing more than tracking public tweets/'check-ins' to predict unit vacancy.
(Another development I eventually expect in this progression of tech-mediated sharing: a bad-faith host who surveils their guests.)
I assumed the drug addict thing too, but to me (although I have limited experience with people on drugs) the fact that they took the time to communicate that "everything was okay" to the host (and had the money to pay for all this (although I guess $500 upfront if they're going to steal $2,000 worth of stuff is an "investment" (I guessed at those $ figures))) makes me think it's something more sinister. They'd have to be pretty eccentric even for drug addicts to go to these lengths.
I too would guess the guests were meth addicts. I had the unfortunate experience of moving in with some tweakers and some of these behaviors gave me flashbacks.
It's a hell of a drug -- my roommate was once a normal young professional, but methamphetamine use turned him into a monster with bizarre, destructive habits around the house, and dark, evil plotting against friends and us roommates.
He would be sober and make normal plans to go to work, fix up the house, have friends over, then he would get really high and skip work, destroy the concrete floor by "power washing" it, and throw a tweaker party with loud music at 3AM, and threaten everyone that asked him to turn it down.
There was violence, abuse, and damage to the property. I removed myself from the apartment for my own safety, and ended up forfeiting thousands of dollars in security deposit for what he did when left completely on his own.
I obviously don't know the situation here, but all of a sudden my thoughts of again hosting CouchSurfers or AirBnB guests is shaken. There are some bad people out there, made even more unstable with drug use, and these sites offer a vector in which they can enter your life.
Could be drug addicts. But my hunch says it could be some known persons to the unfortunate host, playing some dreadful prank. Reasons:
1) From the blog:
'All the while, Dj Pattrson was sending me friendly emails, thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy…. telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight, how much he/she particularly loved the “little loft area” upstairs… with an “lol” closing one sentence'
This suggests motivation to cause a greater hurt. Thieves will just steal. Drug addicts may not punctually mail all the while.
2) Also I suspect the name DJ Pattrson, may have been carefully chosen. Note the author calls herself 'EJ' (and 'DJ' sort of rhymes). I tried jumbling Pattrson for some meaningful word, but could not get any.
Is there anything stopping the renter from taking extra precautions? Like for example photocopy the tenants passport?
I am finding it hard to believe that somebody would drop off the keys to his own apartment to a total stranger, regardless of any guarantees the site does, without even wanting to briefly meet them.
With internet almost run over by all kinds of scam artists, spammers, pedos etc. is there any surprise that such a thing can happen? You have crackers trying their level best to install keyloggers and other tools to read the passwords to your accounts. And in this environment if you hand over the key of your apartment to some complete stranger, I think the writer should also take some blame for his naivety. Just because airbnb is current flavor of the month it does not mean you throw your basic common sense out the door.
Even if you are present in an apartment yourself, it is still too risky to allow a complete stranger to sleep in the room next to you. How much verification can be done by you or airbnb? The Norwegian shooter had no criminal history that could have been caught by any verification. So how can you be comfortable with allowing a stranger into your home with no verification done at all from your side?
I think there should be a service which will allow you to rent the room only to your friends or to friends of friends but no further than that. This friend list can be from facebook, linkedin or Google+. This will reduce the chances of getting a rental but give peace of mind that you are not letting some hardened criminal into your home.
I know this is a horrible and shocking event, and my thoughts are with the person who has had their life violated, but I feel compelled to comment that you are wrong.
The internet is not "almost run over [with] scam artists, spammers, pedos etc." They are visible and use anonymity to do what they do on the internet, certainly, but it is far from overrun.
Secondly, is it really too risky to be asleep without a locked door between you and the world? That is a scary, closed world to live in. You are also wrong to blame the victim; they say themselves they made a mistake not to do more verification, but the blame can only be on the perpetrator †.
Finally, let's not forget that most sexual assaults and rapes [1] are carried out by friends and acquaintances, so limiting your contact to friends of friends is unlikely to make you significantly safer.
Overall, I think your conclusions are the worst to draw from this attack. Take care, but don't go crazy keeping out the "other".
† It might be useful to make a distinction between casual responsibility and moral responsibility. The victim may have done something that helped cause the attack, but they are not at fault.
> Finally, let's not forget that most sexual assaults and rapes [1] are carried out by friends and acquaintances, so limiting your contact to friends of friends is unlikely to make you significantly safer.
I'd imagine that's because those people tend to get let into one's home more than a stranger, which means the stat doesn't help your point much.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadAre you kidding me? Seriously.
That said, I also had they keys to brand new Audi on the kitchen counter (I used to be a car journalist and it was a press test car) and they completely missed them. So, I got off lightly, in some respects, even if the loss of backups is still something that pisses me off today.
I've learned my mistake about backup drives now and do it over wifi to a drive in secret location witheld.
Oh, and they took a bottle of vodka that was 3/4 empty. These scumbags do weird things.
(also, envy on the car journalism; being an equipment reviewer for stuff you really love, like cars, guns, scuba gear, computer gear, headphones, etc., would be a really fun paid hobby)
That said, I guess I'm talking about ~2TB of stuff (work data and personal data) -- wasn't there a thread somewhere that discussed the various options? I'm in the UK, rather than the US, and would rather keep my data in the EU
To this day I'm not sure if it was Comcast or Carbonite that made the uploads so slow, but I've since had to rethink my offsite back up plans. Would love suggestions.
The initial backup of my laptop (200gb since I included iTunes mp3 and 2 x 25gb vmware images) took a couple days when idle. After that the incrementals were basically unnoticed.
In this case physical drives is the way to go.
In an unrelated story, I happened to be moving out of that apartment the same day. And the very next day my new apartment also got robbed.
Maybe the thief forgot to take something?
They also stole my dinner suit. Which I had bought the week before, worn to a party, soaked with my dance sweat, and not yet cleaned. Insurance repaid me the full value of the suit, so essentially I got a "free suit rental" out of the experience.
(Plus the cost of new bars on all my windows. And the experience six months later of, presumably, interrupting the same guy trying to climb in my bathroom window at dinner time. Thankfully he never returned after that.)
edit: or she..
2. Locked closet
- You cannot take everything with you, you have to leave stuff at your _home_ (all the documents mentioned for example).
- I won't try to claim that I can speak for the author, but I'd guess that the valuables lost are less a problem. The violation/emotional troubles seem to be worse.
- Giving the nature of the destruction (it seems so much on purpose, so carefully done) I don't even know if 'did not meet them in person first' would've helped. At least the author would recognize these guys again on the street, but I don't believe that it is proven that you would've sensed something that wrong.. It kind of reads like someone enjoyed a dark fetish by destroying random stuff.
In light of this article, if I ever rented my apartment out for a week, I would box up any sensitive documents, or particularly valuable items, and leave them at a friend's house.
I don't even know if 'did not meet them in person first' would've helped.
Getting a scan of a photo ID, matching it to the person, and possibly getting a current photo of them, along with a license plate number all would be reasonable measures that you could take in a five minute meeting. Not only would they give you more leverage in police investigations, they would probably deter people from trashing/taking your stuff.
The violation/emotional troubles seem to be worse.
Some of the violation comes from the feeling that she can't really do very much about it, and that she was totally unprepared for it. AirBnB offering a few tips, of the "here are some things people to do protect themselves, you might consider them" variety, seems totally reasonable.
Maybe the effect of this will be to make people want personal connections (via fb graph or whatever) to their AirBnB guests, or at least requiring minimum numbers of positive reviews from known sources (to prevent the sockpuppet/shill issue).
I wonder if your renter's or homeowners insurance might cover this kind of thing. If it doesn't generally, it'd be awesome if AirBnB could work with a third party insurer (per jurisdiction) to offer optional insurance to hosts (and guests) against this kind of thing.
And then, of course, there are going to be rare catastrophes like this one -- or worse. Eventually, if the system gets large enough, there will be a sexual assault case. I wonder if Airbnb has pre-baked disaster scenario plans. Eventually they'll have to deal with the emotional, PR, legal and political fallout.
It's still one of the things that keeps me queasy about listing my extra bedroom. I'd guesstimate the replacement value of the contents of my apartment is circa $50k and I'm loathe to gamble with such.
I'd be more worried about a guest setting the house on fire, by accident or not. Fire-damage can easily clock in north of $500k. Good luck explaining the AirBnB concept to your insurance company after a stranger turns out to be "not available anymore" (stolen CC, etc.).
I think you have to be incredibly naive to rent out your personal apartment on AirBnB. The downside risk is virtually unbounded (and lest you think I'm exaggerating: what happens if a tweaker AirBnB renter burns down your building, and your neighbors die in the fire? Hello, civil judgment.)
I believe that both the homeowner and the figurative rape victim are equally innocent.
That's not really how it works.
On the other hand, in some cases someone is negligent in taking some easy precautions; and it's hard not to comment on it. I think that's important too. As others have noted this sort of thing is inevitable, and I think it's productive to talk about ways to possibly mitigate it.
AirBnB was certainly negligent, and I understand the rationale at the time and why she was trusting can appreciate it....but still some common sense precautions like asking the neighbors/friends to check in on your renters and inspect the property could have prevented some of this.
Hindsight is 20/20 and who knows how things would go...maybe no precautions could have prevented this. However I think for the sake of people who may be in a similar situation, it's important to talk about ways to protect yourself.
The problem with the meme about "short skirt = rape" is not that it's completely without truth...the problem is that cases where a victim was actually negligent (to an appreciable extent) are exceptionally rare (say, they decided to go visit an ex boyfriend they knew to be violently insane who told them he would hurt them if he ever saw them again)...and even in such an exceptionally rare case rape apologists reach the wrong conclusions based on that.
The topic is so sticky, I feel compelled to repeat myself. Victims are never to blame for the crimes, criminals are.... However as I believe in learning lessons from mistakes, I would feel compelled to think to myself that if you have an ex-boyfriend who is violently insane you should communicate though court orders, the police, or at least a telephone.
That brings up another important distinction: it's not likely that others will be dating one's crazy ex-boyfriend...so there's not much need to have a discussion about possible ways of dealing with said ex-boyfriend.
No person could really expect getting raped to be a reasonable outcome for wearing a short-skirt/walking alone. It's theoretically possible...so are so many other things that it's not practical to think of or try to avoid them all.
The casual link between wearing a dress/walking alone and getting raped/attacked is much more tenuous (well really it's completely non-existent) than the link between opening your home to a stranger for a week without meeting them face to face or taking various other precautions.
Most people could be reasonably expect problems from just handing over your keys to someone, even if it's just having your towels stolen...and everyone who is considering it should be beaten over the head with that fact and do as much as they can to mitigate that risk.
This woman has a point that AirBnB was remiss in reminding her, they have that responsibility. She also has a responsibility herself to take precautions, but that does not negate AirBnB's...I also think she is completely aware at this point in where she failed....but for the sake of others reading the story who might face similar risks, I think it's worth-while to discuss it.
Also, I somewhat agree with the grand-parent that the way the woman in the article compares telling a woman to not wear a skirt in order to avoid rape with talking/thinking about ways she might have avoided the ordeal is not an entirely accurate comparison...though considering what she's been through if I were talking to her personally I probably wouldn't press the point. She's already learned her lesson, the discussion is only worthwhile to have for observers.
Actually the evidence is the other way: women who wear modest clothing are more likely to get raped than those who wear sexy clothing. This is because rapists see modest clothing as a sign of submissiveness and are more likely to assault women they see as submissive. http://clubtroppo.com.au/2011/05/17/does-provocative-clothin...
"... emphasize that the customer service team at airbnb.com has been wonderful..."
reconcilable with this:
"...My next call was to airbnb.com - I tried their "urgent" line, their email address, their general customer support line. I heard nothing - no response whatsoever - until the following day, 14 sleepless hours later, and only after a desperate call to an airbnb.com freelancer I happen to know helped my case get some attention..."
Does that mean you'd have to know someone who works at AirBnB before you can get customer service? I've heard similar stories about Google, too.
One of their suggestions was that airbnb add immediately a 24/7 customer service line, which would have fixed the initial delay.
You can get a new SS number, and you can get a new passport which makes the old ones null - but as far as a birth certificate goes - I'm not too privy on the security features of those documents. I do know though that they are rarely used to impersonate and more often used as forgery material.
(please correct me if I'm wrong)
That is shocking.
Even if they didn't ransack my place completely, as happened to the unfortunate author - I would be concerned about unintentional damage to my property that I might not discover till too late. Renting out something as private as my primary place of residence just seems like a generally bad idea, especially when I am not around to constantly check in on it. Even if I got to meet them, and they seemed like nice people whats to stop them from leaving without paying if they accidentally broke my TV ?
As the service expands, and becomes more craigslist-y (in terms of audience) I can only see problems like this getting worse, and apart from implementing some kind of guest / host rating system (like ecommerce portals do with sellers) I see no clear solution to the problem.
There's a reason hotels exist, and there's a reason why it's a bad idea to hitch-hike, or even worse, stay with people you don't know.
If I'm going traveling, I'm sure as hell in "untrusting" mode since I don't have a clue what the locals are like.
There's strangers as in "local resident I see each day but don't know", and there's strangers as in "I've just traveled to a completely different country and have no clue who this person is"
Wanting to trust everyone and believing majority of people are good is a nice hippy dream. There's some nasty horrible people out there.
http://familyonbikes.org/blog/2011/01/isn’t-bike-touring-dan...
A woman hitchhiked through the middle east dressed as a bride to promote world peace and was murdered and raped.
Are either of these anecdotes indicative of people's experiences when travelling? No. Is there potential danger in relying heavily on stranger's good intentions? Perhaps.
Bullshit. Live in fear of strangers your whole life or trust the basic humanity of strangers. Either way you're still going to die of heart disease like the rest of us. Why don't you live in constant fear of that?
Stranger danger is a result of a fear-mongering media. Are you seriously worried about serial killers? Do you know how few of them there are and how freaking many people there are in the world?
People love to live in fear of things like strangers because it's immediate and controllable. They can just choose to stay away from them. It gives people a sense of control. Heart disease is long-term and amorphous. It's harder to gain immediate relief from fear of that.
By all means, don't leave a bunch of cash around while staying at a stranger's house. Take reasonable precautions. But fearing people by default is irrational.
However I believe one should not indulge in it.
This faith is very precious and this is exactly why it is a sin to rely upon it in the wrong circumstances. I live in Japan, that has a very low crime rate, but I found it very interesting when they told me "Don't leave anything valuable at the office. There is very little chance that something might happen, but can you imagine how you will feel and act towards your colleagues if something happens..." What you value you must protect. Although it sounds controversial, this means that it is your obligation to protect your faith to the goodness of people from the ones that could destroy it.
Strawman. I don't live in fear of strangers. They don't haunt my dreams or make me break out in cold sweat or make me stop going places. But I keep my eye out, because I am not stupidly naive about it.
It's not as irrational as you think, either. The majority of people are decent, or society wouldn't exist at all. However, the non-decent ones tend to seek out travelers and other people who can be victimized. This is why the best advice to give to your kids is that they can probably trust anyone they walk up to if they have a serious problem, but anyone who approaches them for anything out-of-the-ordinary should probably be treated with great skepticism. Statistically speaking there are many situations, such as traveling, where you are disproportionately likely to encounter the non-decent types. Ignore this fact at your own peril.
I'll take my hotel room thankyou.
The risk/reward trade-offs don't seem to be understood by most AirBnB landlords (99.99% chance of earning $100, 0.01% chance of losing $50k+). Even though this is strongly positive expected value, for a family that can't afford to lose $50k this is a game of russian roulette.
My heart goes out to the author of this; I hope the person who did this to her is put in jail, and the system (AirBnB) that enabled that person prevents landlords who can't afford the financial & emotional risk from listing properties going forward.
This is one those places where laws make sense to me; the average person needs to be protected from unknowingly gambling with their family's future.
What kind of laws do you suggest?
Also interesting: limiting vacation rentals to accredited investors.
(edit: and requiring places like AirBnB to verify those requirements before you can list with them)
Protective laws have very high hidden costs. These costs are hard to quantify and routinely are neglected when discussing pros and cons of said laws.
If yes, please explain why. If not, please tell me what's different here. I'm genuinely confused why you said what you said.
I am speaking out against mandatory insurance of your own property. Yes, there will be cases where people are underinsured. But mandatory insurance would make some people overinsured. There is a long argument to be made for balancing this tradeoff, but in short: Owners are in a better position to judge whether they should insure their property than lawmakers and thus it should be up to them (again: as long as their property doesn't have a high probability of damaging other people; in such cases mandatory insurance might be reasonable).
The basic problem is that a "people know what's best for themselves" policy screws over dumb people for the simple reason that they don't.
Car insurance is a very interesting thing to legislate, because although the expected value of buying insurance is slightly negative, when you factor in the economies of scale on dealing with someone else's car getting repaired (figuring out if a bill is over market, handling multiple bills, tracking any medical expenses, etc), purchasing car insurance is strongly positive EV.
I think landlord insurance is similar.
>> Car insurance is different, because it also covers damages you inflict on others and other people's property.
Landlord insurance of course also covers this (if your property catches fire while you're renting it out, you may very well be legally responsible, if a previous renter breaks in and steals the new renters belongings you are probably legally responsible, etc).
Regardless, it seems based on what you said that you might be in favor of requiring renters to buy insurance. Is this correct?
Probably not worth to be codified as a law, after all, some may choose to bypass it, but other than that there are plenty of companies selling it (vacation properties and rentals existed long before AirBnB), and AirBnB could benefit from linking to those vendors.
Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.
It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.
Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?
Perhaps, but the chance of losing >$100 one way or another (negligence, accidents, outright theft) is going to be a lot greater than 0.01% anyway.
So the risk of this happening to you is not like the risk of dying by traveling 20 kilometers by car, but more like the risk of dying by traveling 700 kilometers by car.
(Of course that's assuming that past performance is some kind of a guide to future results. It could be that all kinds of tweakers are going to get on Airbnb now and trash things that one of their friends has had a taste, or it could be that future people thinking of doing this kind of thing will be deterred by the rapid arrest of the apparent culprit in this case.)
They won't be replaced, just added to. Many travelers prefer the local flavor to some sterile hotel.
This could happen (especially if people get scared off by one-in-a-million crimes like this one) but it isn't economically rational. The marginal cost of having someone stay in your spare bedroom is often very small, even negative. This is never the case for commercial hotels.
I would go as far as to say that commercial hotels only exist at all because of an information deficiency: on the traveler's side, about the available spare bedrooms, and on the host's side, about the trustworthiness of the traveler. (Except in exceptional cases, say, Gualeguaychú, which has enormous tourism, dwarfing the city's population for a few weeks a year, and nothing the rest of the time. But I still stayed in a spare room with some random family I met on the street when I went there for Carnaval, not in a hotel.)
It occurs to me that the people with the strongest incentives to trash someone's apartment like this would be hotel owners and managers. Many of them might not be willing or able to do it themselves, but they could certainly hire someone else.
Guest rating system is even harder, as unless you're hardcore traveler, your use of AirBnB might be limited to once or twice a year. This would also penalize any new user to the service.
Put me in mind of this story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/nyregion/a-revenge-plot-so...
Operating a property remotely via AirBnB implies all sorts of risks, which makes me think that it might be an unsustainable model, because a black swan event might ruin the property to such extent that it offsets the income made in all the other cases.
AirBnB handles property promotion and property booking on the Internet -- that's fine -- but when it advertised itself it included in the message ways to do property administration (as in rent-your-home-while-away). While this is not connected intricately with their core business, it is the model that some owners assumed by default, without realizing the risks involved or the fact that you are still exposed to one-in-one-hundred unpleasant events.
If they manage to warn about this upfront similar to the way Craiglist does, without losing their brand and their community support, then owners will become aware of those issues and take the necessary protection (by i.e. requesting guarantees/deposits/passports or by using their social network to validate the guests). If they don't, I'm afraid a couple of bad PR articles will be enough to destroy their reputation.
P.S.: I haven't heard of hotels managed remotely; there are some hotels where you check in automatically and you get the keys via some sort of robot system but in the morning there is someone handling the checkout, the cleaning etc. In addition they have your credit card on file, your passport, probably your cam photo when you picked up the keys and the most you can destroy is a hotel room (still a great deal of value but somehow limited and the hotel probably has insurance for it). But automation didn't pick up at scale in the hotel industry. In the current state, it thrives partially because the reception provides the safety-checks and balances needed to prevent and offset these black swan events. I'm not sure the remote administration model is scalable or even manage-able due to this.
It sounds like the person who trashed the OP's apartment /enjoyed/ trashing it -- it didn't sound like someone inconsiderate, or in a hurry; it sounded like someone who deliberately and knowingly ruined the place. The security measures you suggest won't stop that sort of attacker.
I agree identity validation, and being there to hear loud noises/odd behavior makes it harder / less fun for an attacker -- but this is not what allows hotels to operate effectively. Some percentage of hotel registrations surely occur with stolen passports, etc. Hotels rather build this cost into their business model in a manner similar to an insurance company.
Because hotels rent so many rooms at a time, they can treat these costs in the same way that your car insurance company treats accident risk -- something that is always happening that can be offset in real time by honest people using the hotel as per the contract.
Letting people into your home does not have that risk-sharing property -- it's insuring a single driver instead of tens of thousands -- you open yourself up to a very real risk of losing a lot of money.
(Not to mention that hotels are not personally attached to the rental rooms).
The attacker in the story must have somehow gotten stolen credit card information...
that is the point why they take down your credit card data before giving you the keys. Your vandalizing after that is just an entertainment your card will be charged for.
>The security measures you suggest won't stop that sort of attacker.
so you think the attacker has perfect credit history and there is absolutely no sense in checking it?
The interesting thing will be the gmail account's IP history. I suspect SFPD will get the IP history and I hope this DJ Pattrson logged in from an identifiable location (or that the phone number, presumably a prepaid, is linkable to location and identity somehow).
SFPD is one of the better police forces to have to work with on this; I'd sure rather be dealing with them than Oakland or various other East Bay police forces. You might also want to involve REACT (http://www.reacttf.org/), the Silicon Valley (incl SF) high tech crime task force. They'll be good at tracking someone down through online identity, compared to local police.
I wonder if AirBnB has offered the host/victim some AirBnB credit to stay elsewhere while her place is being de-trashed.
I check into lots of hotels and about 50% of the time they require an actual government-issued photo ID; I assume for room-trashing situations and the probably more-common situation where somebody racks up a huge bill and then steals away in the middle of the night leaving nothing but a stolen CC number.
It's a lot more difficult, and the legal penalties are much steeper, for forging a government-issued identity document than for using a prepaid credit card with a false name on it.
A black swan event is something that is very difficult to predict,often because it lies outside normal parameters and expectations.
Renting your place out to strangers who then trash it might be surprising, but hardly beyond the realms of imagination or expectation.
They never showed up.
Screw your bizmodel.
Run a credit and criminal background check - and charge 4%.
AirBnB should be the one matching photos to real, living individuals since not everyone renting out their home is likely to be as through as a company with a well-established procedure.
So you're saying AirBnB should advocate against rentals while you're away?
Or are you saying, if you want to rent while you're gone for a week, that you should get a week's worth of self-storage (which I've never heard of, but might exist in a city), move all your important belongings to the self-storage unit, and move them back after the guest is gone? That seems quite onerous.
I think people should use AirBnB however they see fit, but understand the risks in doing so and take whatever precautions are realistic to lessen them.
This situation would still suck, but not be nearly as bad/scary/expensive if the victim hadn't left cash, credit cards, expensive electronics, legal documents etc. in the apartment. I'm just recommending easy steps to lower the potential downside and increase the overall EV of being an AirBnB provider given that this sort of nightmare is a slight but real possibility.
I've been a happy AirBnb guest on a few occasions; the one time I had someone's whole usual studio apartment I found it a bit strange how much of their life was left on display for me – like the host's prescriptions still in the fridge! – but of course respected their privacy.
Each time I've been a guest, we've seen photos of each other on the site, and the keys were handed off in person. While I didn't expect anyone to stop by and check on me during my stays, I always had the impression the host or host's friends were nearby.
A guest with criminal intent would try to pick a place for a longer stay, in a more anonymous building, with a host known to be out-of-town. But then again, that's also what someone seeking to burglarize any vacation-emptied residence would do. More or less this same sort of crime could happen without AirBnb, or perhaps be enabled by nothing more than tracking public tweets/'check-ins' to predict unit vacancy.
(Another development I eventually expect in this progression of tech-mediated sharing: a bad-faith host who surveils their guests.)
It's a hell of a drug -- my roommate was once a normal young professional, but methamphetamine use turned him into a monster with bizarre, destructive habits around the house, and dark, evil plotting against friends and us roommates.
He would be sober and make normal plans to go to work, fix up the house, have friends over, then he would get really high and skip work, destroy the concrete floor by "power washing" it, and throw a tweaker party with loud music at 3AM, and threaten everyone that asked him to turn it down.
There was violence, abuse, and damage to the property. I removed myself from the apartment for my own safety, and ended up forfeiting thousands of dollars in security deposit for what he did when left completely on his own.
I obviously don't know the situation here, but all of a sudden my thoughts of again hosting CouchSurfers or AirBnB guests is shaken. There are some bad people out there, made even more unstable with drug use, and these sites offer a vector in which they can enter your life.
Could be drug addicts. But my hunch says it could be some known persons to the unfortunate host, playing some dreadful prank. Reasons:
1) From the blog: 'All the while, Dj Pattrson was sending me friendly emails, thanking me for being such a great host, for respecting his/her privacy…. telling me how much he/she was enjoying my beautiful apartment bathed in sunlight, how much he/she particularly loved the “little loft area” upstairs… with an “lol” closing one sentence' This suggests motivation to cause a greater hurt. Thieves will just steal. Drug addicts may not punctually mail all the while.
2) Also I suspect the name DJ Pattrson, may have been carefully chosen. Note the author calls herself 'EJ' (and 'DJ' sort of rhymes). I tried jumbling Pattrson for some meaningful word, but could not get any.
I am finding it hard to believe that somebody would drop off the keys to his own apartment to a total stranger, regardless of any guarantees the site does, without even wanting to briefly meet them.
Doesn't AirBnB do that? If no, then why?!
Disclaimer: never used the service.
Even if you are present in an apartment yourself, it is still too risky to allow a complete stranger to sleep in the room next to you. How much verification can be done by you or airbnb? The Norwegian shooter had no criminal history that could have been caught by any verification. So how can you be comfortable with allowing a stranger into your home with no verification done at all from your side?
I think there should be a service which will allow you to rent the room only to your friends or to friends of friends but no further than that. This friend list can be from facebook, linkedin or Google+. This will reduce the chances of getting a rental but give peace of mind that you are not letting some hardened criminal into your home.
The internet is not "almost run over [with] scam artists, spammers, pedos etc." They are visible and use anonymity to do what they do on the internet, certainly, but it is far from overrun.
Secondly, is it really too risky to be asleep without a locked door between you and the world? That is a scary, closed world to live in. You are also wrong to blame the victim; they say themselves they made a mistake not to do more verification, but the blame can only be on the perpetrator †.
Finally, let's not forget that most sexual assaults and rapes [1] are carried out by friends and acquaintances, so limiting your contact to friends of friends is unlikely to make you significantly safer.
Overall, I think your conclusions are the worst to draw from this attack. Take care, but don't go crazy keeping out the "other".
† It might be useful to make a distinction between casual responsibility and moral responsibility. The victim may have done something that helped cause the attack, but they are not at fault.
[1] According to (admitted a random googling) the American Centre for Victims of Crime, 77% of rapes are committed by non-strangers. http://www.ncvc.org/ncvc/main.aspx?dbName=DocumentViewer&...
I'd imagine that's because those people tend to get let into one's home more than a stranger, which means the stat doesn't help your point much.