The psychographic target is also not some mystery advanced ai has to unravel… Individuals who relish social settings, finding joy in connections with others, often possess an adventurous spirit, embracing novelty and pursuing thrills. Typically extroverted, they thrive amidst lively atmospheres, delighting in music, dancing, and various forms of entertainment commonly found at gatherings. Prioritizing fun and relaxation, these individuals treasure parties as opportunities to unwind and savor life's pleasures. Some among them exhibit a willingness to take risks, drawn to experiences that provide an adrenaline rush and a sense of adventure.
With all this said, airbnb is literally attacking the majority of the user base that made airbnb what it is. Sounds like airbnb may need to rebrand to Auntie BnB and start charging micro-transactions for small thrills once their user base is thoroughly oppressed.
Easy peasy lemon full-on technofascist authoritarianism dystopian hellhole.
Genuine question, but how will Airbnb know this about you? Are you suggesting they've bought some 3rd party dataset that contains this information about its customers, or is somehow inferring these precise personality interests by looking at a customer's prior bookings?
I'm aware Airbnb lets you book 'experiences', which could be used to infer personality, but I'm not sure how popular these actually are (as an extrovert with extroverted friends in their lates 20s/early 30s I don't know anyone that has booked any).
I think it's possibly much simpler than we think - they can probably just look at your average booking size by number of guests (to determine how likely you frequently party), the type of property/location you've booked, and how close to NYE you've made the booking (a last minute NYE booking with 13 guests screams party).
I wish your post was written by GPT, it makes me sadder that a human wrote it.
I have always been a party throwing animal. This clinical detachment you speak of is a human that realizes how detached clinical assessments actually are.
That would be profiling. Instead, we have an ethical AI. :)
This doesn't say how it works, and Airbnb has published things like this before, like "Airbnb deploys AI to crack down on parties over Halloween" from a couple months ago, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38016113 or in general "Airbnb Is Launching 'Anti-Party Tools' to Stop Parties" from mid-2022, via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32497758.
At this point I think we can say this news is more a marketing blurb than anything new or interesting.
This is most likely a (simple) ML model trained on previous reports of such bookings.
Not newsworthy, but probably not a bunch of if-statements.
The result is a bunch of if-statements. ;)
booking.decline(show_random_error=True)
else:
booking.confirm()
So much fun.
The attestation is fine but blocking?
I wonder if can be used to do other stuff, like ML models that distribute the guests in certain ways to increase the chance of certain people meet in order to boost or suppress political movements. Maybe block or overprice individuals likely to engage in environmental activities in sponsorship with the oil companies? Maybe arrange pricing and availability in certain way to demoralize people from certain ideologies so it's more likely they have less energy and money to their thing.
This is the kind of stuff EU needs to block.
Airbnb needs to be blocked all together in the EU. I lost track of how many cities pushed people out and became unaffordable to the locals, because the rentals went to Airbnbs and tourists.
Housing should be for shelter of the people who live, work and study there, not for tourists, they have registered hotels, motels, inns, etc dedicated just for that.
I opt for hotels as much as I possibly can, but when travelling with a group or family, hotels are perceived as "anti-social," which I think is really the only thing keeping Airbnb alive at this stage — the social norms.
Apartment rentals on booking.com/hotels.com is, at least, a bit closer to what I want — but most are still tailored around the long-stay/corporate travellers... Airbnb does fill that niche well.
But soon enough they diverged from that into the "whole buildings bought by deep pocket owners to build apartments for Airbnb" thing that hurts neighborhoods and is a net negative for cities.
Also now with the big service fees they charge, I usually just prefer avoiding Airbnb altogether. Between their +80€ creeping up from nowhere after having chosen a place, and the "cleaning fee" (for nothing because owners will just clean a bit) that ends up being another +50€ or so, makes most places I see in Airbnb hardly competitive against hotels or proper tourism-approved apartments in other platforms.
There's a shortage of housing everywhere, there's no place for Airbnb in such an environment.
And so the houses gets trashed and whilst insurance covers the damage it doesn't cover lost income.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/uk-gdpr-guidance-and-re...
> Article 22(1) of the UK GDPR limits the circumstances in which you can make solely automated decisions, including those based on profiling, that have a legal or similarly significant effect on individuals.
"legal or similarly significant effect on individuals" includes discrimination based on any protected characteristics.
AirBnB in any defence will have to prove that race, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc were _not_ part of any automated decision.
As the article mentions that this is being deployed to the UK I have cited a UK specific article.
Wouldn't the workaround for airbnb to be having a member of staff 'approve' the decision (where the member of staff has thousands to approve a day,and understands that their job is to just click approve all the time).
Right to protest[0]
Right to strike[1]
Human rights[2]
[0] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/uk-passing-new-pub...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jan/05/uk-ministers...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/nov/19/rishi-sunak-...
Update: For the down-voters, my wife was banned from Airbnb for being from the “wrong” country despite her being a naturalized US citizen.
Certain political and medical positions have received active suppression on these platforms which are then defended as misinformation only to be shown accurate years later.
There are lots of laws that may apply here. The First Amendment isn’t one of them.
