I can also imagine the problems when someone has, for instance, their work and personal phones with them.

People seem to be pretty universally incapable of not assuming computer products to be infallible, especially when they might get some extra money in "over occupancy" fees.

This is purely party prevention. I've had ZERO pushback asking to host a group of friends over for dinner. I ask the owner. Mild inconvenience IMO when you think about the problem they are trying to prevent, the home being thrashed by a large party and the guests having no care about your home.

On the other hand, you could argue that the reason they have a “no daytime visitors” rule in the first place is because they have no way of knowing how manhunt visitors there are so they just make the rule “none” so they don’t have to try to provide how many were there at once.

If you could accurately know how many people there are and when they are there, you could have a more reasonable rule like “no more than 3 guests during the day and they have to leave by 9pm” or something.

I think you're being disingenuous in that you're only looking at half the story. I don't use AirBnB either as a host or a guest, so I may be missing something here, but to me, this seems to fall squarely into "this is why we can't have nice things" territory.

Of course, if you have someone over for coffee, there probably is no issue. Of course, if you have many people over for a crazy party, there will probably be a boatload of issues.

The problem is there are plenty of dishonest people who'll try to skirt their responsibilities in the in-between situations. Maybe it's difficult to hide that you've had 50 people over. But if you're renting for, say, 4 people and you have 10 more people over? I'd guess it's not directly evident. So if those people aren't hell-bent on thrashing the place, but you know, shit happens? Perhaps the guest will try to say that the couch already had a wine stain, or the dishes were already chipped, or whatever. And if a neighbor complained about the noise? There were just four of us, we kept it reasonable, but we can't be completely mute.

So of course hosts will try to hedge against these behaviors. And, of course, people trying to be reasonable will get the short straw. Next thing you know, water will be found to be wet or something crazy like that.

Indeed. I live in a wealthy suburb in Oregon in the U.S., but my specific neighborhood is fairly middle class starter homes. It's nestled in an ordinarily very quiet and extremely safe place.

The next street over from me is an affordable housing duplex complex. I think about 20-30 duplexes total which house families with children. This is not a college town nor does it have anything within walking distance that would make it attract the busy-life. Several of these duplexes recently vacated their tenants and remodeled to charge more rent. The rent increase was too much and they sat empty for some time. The owners then put it up for sale and it was subsequently bought up by AirBnB investors.

This has brought a litany of issues. We've had several instances now of huge house parties where they rent all of the duplexes at once, and this has brought large police encounters. There's been property damage and violence against neighbors as a result of these parties. The commotion is not contained unfortunately and bleeds out into the neighboring streets, including my residence. We're talking probably a good 500ft radius from the actual AirBnB homes to the surrounding neighborhood. That's a large blast radius for those of us that never agreed to have this sort of presence so close to our homes. I feel awful for the homes in the actual complex, is they are getting the brunt of the disruption.

The last time I finally had it and collected video evidence then reported them to AirBnb citing the violence, property damage, and police reports. AirBnb was surprisingly responsive and so far it's been a couple of months without any issues - knock on wood. However my anger at the displacement of low income families in place of AirBnb homes remains. They have zero investment in the well-being of our neighborhood and only care about turning a profit on the homes. It frustrates me to no end.

Short-term rentals really need to be taxed accordingly to compensate for the cost of their externalities (loss of single-family houses in the market). I'm not sure how many localities do this.

100%. In less than a decade this so-called innovation went from "I want to host travelers in my spare bedroom to help make rent" to "I want to buy up homes in popular areas during a housing crunch and pimp them out to frat parties". I have lived next to a property by one of these "superhosts" and it's hell on the neighborhood.

STRs are a disgusting and tasteless business and I avoid staying in them at all costs

Low risk there, Android users are way less likely to throw a party

> The dog also briefly went in the house (which I think is poor form, to be clear).

Extremely poor form. Dog people seem to struggle with accepting these kinds of boundaries around their dogs for reasons I’ve never understood.

Although I don’t think the dog should have been in the yard, either. No dogs means no dogs. There can be liability/insurance reasons on top of just not wanting dog shit in your yard.

> My friend counter-complained to Airbnb that the host was surveilling us.

I can’t imagine being an Airbnb host with issues like this.

I’ve stayed in plenty of airbnbs where the owners lived nearby, and noticing a tenant breaking the rules when you drive by doesn’t sound like surveillance.

Of course, but most AirBnB hosts want a product, not a project.

Five bucks says it's just an ESP32 with some sensors wired up to it going to "their" cloud. That's all they all end up being, just in a fancy package buttoned up for the end user.

I ripped apart a https://restsensor.com/ "hotel air quality sensor" I got on eBay and it ended up being just that: an ESP32 hooked to a Sensiron SEN55.

Here's the FCC documents for one of the minut devices to judge for yourself:

https://fccid.io/2AFXO-AM01/Internal-Photos/internal-photo-6...

Either that or some ESP32. It also includes a smart smoke alarm and noise meter. But property managers aren't going to want to roll their own solution to this.

Android does the same MAC rotation that Apple does, both on WiFi and Bluetooth. Working with IoT sniffing solutions at home, I've found it's reasonably easy to detect when a single MAC is randomly changed: it'll be broadcasting its presence, suddenly go dark, and then another mac with same first 3 bytes starts broadcasting with a very similar RSSI. This works with BLE adverts pretty well and allows me to filter out MAC noise from household devices while I'm trying to sniff something on my bench.

None of the developers ever saw one, or they firmly believe focusing on iOS makes the product more 'luxe'

I'd assume it's because it's easier to look for an Apple MAC prefix than trying to figure out if some other device is a phone or not.

But with MAC randomization (both wifi and Bluetooth), I'm not sure what they are doing here that would effectively sort iPhones from other devices doing the same.

Green text ppl aren't getting invited

I'm guessing it's because iPhones are easier to characterize over dozens of different android MAC address prefixes.

But with MAC address randomization, I don't recall Apple doing anything different than other vendors so not sure what they are detecting that an Android wouldn't reveal as well.

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Absolutely, maybe 15 years ago, and it was / is used by shops to detect recurring visitors and get a better understanding of their behavior.

It’s also why anonymization of wifi started being pushed by Apple et al, which still does provide a stable client id but that’s only being broadcast as part of the DHCP handshake, which cannot be used here.

yes -- I think xfinity uses it to implement this: https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion

Quite the logical leap