There’s not a hint in this article that discrimination is commonsense, that not all races and religions act equally, and that there may be practical reasons that people might not want to rent to members of groups with high crime rates (such as people under age 25).
The sharing economy (AirBNB, Uber, etc) is not going to work well when you deal with low trust, high crime groups.
In response to growing complaints of racial bias among its users, Airbnb will beef up its nondiscrimination policy, do more to diversify its own workforce and offer implicit-bias training to its hosts, according to a report released Thursday after a three-month review by the company.
But the short-term rental site will not, for now, concede to critics one of their chief requests: abandoning the user photos that make it easy to identify online who is a minority.
“After thoroughly analyzing this issue, I came to believe that Airbnb guests should not be asked or required to hide behind curtains of anonymity when trying to find a place to stay,” Laura Murphy, a former longtime American Civil Liberties Union official who was brought on as an advisor to lead Airbnb’s review, said in the report. “Technology can bring us together and technology shouldn’t ask us to hide who we are. Instead, we should be implementing new, creative solutions to fight discrimination and promote understanding.”
By the end of the year, the San Francisco company is vowing instead to experiment with reducing the visibility of photos on booking pages and promoting in their place other reputation information, such as reviews. The issue has been a thorny one for the company, which argues that photos — as well as real names — are necessary to create trust and ensure safety on a platform where millions of strangers rent space in one another’s private homes.
