Evil happens when you are separated from the pain you inflict upon other people.
If only someone would invent a time machine so we can see what effects our actions have on the far future...
We communicated via SMS instead of AirBnb’s website because AirBnb’s website has an algorithm that scans our messages for keywords and punishes hosts it thinks did a poor job—regardless of the star rating a customer like me provides.
I was skeptical of this after reading (from one of your comment replies) that you only heard about this from the host, but some searching turned up a report in the NYT (confirming an original report in the WSJ) that’s even worse:
Most recently, in April, The Journal’s Christopher Mims looked at a company called Sift, whose proprietary scoring system tracks 16,000 factors for companies like Airbnb and OkCupid. “Sift judges whether or not you can be trusted,” he wrote, “yet there’s no file with your name that it can produce upon request.”
As of this summer, though, Sift does have a file on you, which it can produce upon request. I got mine, and I found it shocking: More than 400 pages long, it contained all the messages I’d ever sent to hosts on Airbnb; years of Yelp delivery orders; a log of every time I’d opened the Coinbase app on my iPhone. Many entries included detailed information about the device I used to do these things, including my IP address at the time.
If only someone would invent a time machine so we can see what effects our actions have on the far future...
I was skeptical of this after reading (from one of your comment replies) that you only heard about this from the host, but some searching turned up a report in the NYT (confirming an original report in the WSJ) that’s even worse:
welp, that’s horrifying and also honestly quite expected...