<story><title>Airbnb Competitor Checks IDs: &apos;We Don&apos;t Want to Trade Security for Volume&apos;</title><url>http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/29/airbnb-competitor-roomorama-we-dont-want-to-trade-security-for-volume/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>They have to be careful, though, as this kind of thing can be considered libel or slander if not 100% true, and collusion even if it is true.  Having an industry-wide blacklist will almost definitely run afoul of the law.</text></item><item><author>mbreese</author><text>Any of Airbnb&apos;s competitors are going to use this to their advantage.  Rightfully so too... I didn&apos;t even know about Roomorama until this story.&lt;p&gt;The biggest part of the story though was thrown in at the end:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The harrowing story of the Airbnb user EJ prompted Ms. En Teo to reach out to her competitors in order to set a precedent for sharing information about sketchy users, so if she gets a report about misbehavior she can send an alert to get him or her banned from other sites. Incidents like this hurt the entire market as well as individual users, she said.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some kind of data sharing would be a great thing for this industry as they are all vulnerable to the same problems (theft, etc...).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghshephard</author><text>Bars do this all the time in areas where there are problems - they scan your ID and then share the information with other bars, particularly if you get booted.&lt;p&gt;In the United States, if you make a good faith claim about someone, it&apos;s pretty hard to win a libel suit, and, I suspect, it would be even harder to claim that grading an individual rises to the level of slander/libel, particularly if you provide a mechanism to challenge the claims.&lt;p&gt;If this were not the cases, then credit rating agencies would have a difficult time existing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Airbnb Competitor Checks IDs: &apos;We Don&apos;t Want to Trade Security for Volume&apos;</title><url>http://www.betabeat.com/2011/07/29/airbnb-competitor-roomorama-we-dont-want-to-trade-security-for-volume/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>wccrawford</author><text>They have to be careful, though, as this kind of thing can be considered libel or slander if not 100% true, and collusion even if it is true.  Having an industry-wide blacklist will almost definitely run afoul of the law.</text></item><item><author>mbreese</author><text>Any of Airbnb&apos;s competitors are going to use this to their advantage.  Rightfully so too... I didn&apos;t even know about Roomorama until this story.&lt;p&gt;The biggest part of the story though was thrown in at the end:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;The harrowing story of the Airbnb user EJ prompted Ms. En Teo to reach out to her competitors in order to set a precedent for sharing information about sketchy users, so if she gets a report about misbehavior she can send an alert to get him or her banned from other sites. Incidents like this hurt the entire market as well as individual users, she said.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Some kind of data sharing would be a great thing for this industry as they are all vulnerable to the same problems (theft, etc...).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mattdeboard</author><text>Internet attorneys seem to love turning libel laws into this blanket prohibition on ever saying anything negative about someone or something that is not &quot;100% true&quot; and verifiable.&lt;p&gt;This doesn&apos;t even touch libel laws, and it certainly wouldn&apos;t be a _group_ culpability if there&apos;s one purveyor out there intentionally spreading malicious lies about some private person.</text></comment>