How do you feel about this? As a host I love it, as a guest, I don’t care, I’m a polite person with excellent reviews but I can’t help thinking that on some level is kind of wrong.
Wrong on so many levels…
I’m curious as to why you find it wrong to data mine public information to creat an informative risk analysis of an individual? I originally tried to do this with all guests that booked with me by googling their name. I eventually stopped because I never found a public piece of information that would make me question the quality of my guests. I know what I put out on social media is fair game for others to judge me, so should any adult - there is no expectation of privacy.
AirBnB acquired Trooly in June 2017, two and a half years ago. The Telegraph apparently discovered this only after the US patent was approved as an EU patent.
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As I said, as a host I love this. Awesome! But at the back of my mind I’m like, well we are all numbers to them. Just like the credit score. God knows I had times in my life - when I divorced and my finances took a hit - when my credit score was bad. So just like I don’t think I was a bad person back then I somehow think we can’t simply apply a formula to everyone in order to find out if they are sane or psihopats.
I’m appalled. A booking platform is now trolling social media accounts of their users and *practicing unlicensed psychiatry."
We’re that much closer to that horrible episode of “Black Mirror” where your every move is dictated by the narcissism of others (likes, hearts, backstabbing tweets).
I’m quite surprised (and I know that I shouldn’t be) that anyone actually cares about this.
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I’m indifferent. This ranks so low on my scale of things to be outraged by. I don’t see it as being any different than being gossiped about in the 1420 village.
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We don’t know what the algorithm does, but truth be told I, as a host, could form a decision of allowing or not allowing someone in my home if I could have a glimpse of guests’s social media, be it FB, LinkedIn or whatever. I know someone in my city who runs a hostel as a nonprofit and when booking he asks all his potential guests access to their social media before approving. It’s on his hostel website. Stay at his hostel are donation based.
Well, judging by the number of narcissistic and drunken guests that hosts get on a daily basis, I can’t imagine what they are doing with this information that would be of any use 
It’s safe to just assume that narcissism seems to be the go-to attitude in the selfie and reality TV culture and be grateful when you get guests who are appreciative and non-demanding.
The author is purely speculating that Airbnb actually uses the technology on Airbnb guests, but assuming they do, the problem is that it isn’t infallible and will occasionally flag a guest as being a risk or somehow undesirable resulting in cancelled reservations or closed account and Airbnb’s policies make it impossible for the guest to fight. The second problem is that if they do use it on guests, they will most certainly start using it to profile hosts.
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I certainly don’t approve of it, but since the technology is out there and is used for profiling, not just by Airbnb, but who knows how many other entities, that’s one of the reasons that, apart from a couple of hosting forums, I don’t participate in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other social media.
@MissMarple – there is a WORLD of difference between “data mining” and software that makes psychological evaluations based on randomly mined data.
What fonking data can they find about me that will give any remotely accurate record of my past, present or future mental state, degree that I care strongly about much of anything (let alone myself - narcissism)?? What the fonk does my tee shirt size, sperm count and belief in alien life forms have to do with my suitability as a guest??
If you’re going to judge me on some randomly collected bunch of mis-information that I’ve been feeding the Internet for the last decade, then I probably wouldn’t want to stay at your listing anyway!
If you ever bought something online I think vendors have enough info on you already. Or if you visit sights. It doesn’t matter if you are on social media at all. Truth be told it is rather odd for someone not to be found on the internet at all. I mean, when someone applies for a job the employer looked for that person social media as well. In my experience only my parents generation or military are not on the internet at all.