The decline in online anonymity, though, may introduce its own problems.  By Carmen Nobel 
 
 White vacationers have an easier time booking an Airbnb rental property than African-Americans do, according to a new study from faculty at Harvard Business School. They found that requests from guests with distinctively African-American-sounding names were decidedly less likely to be accepted than identical guests with white-sounding names. In contrast, guests with African-American-sounding names were accepted roughly 42 percent of the time. That doesn't mean that the desk clerks at a Marriott are any less likely to have implicit bias than your average Airbnb host. However, these advantages are by no means guaranteed, and in fact they depend on design choices made by each online platform. To this point, the researchers have developed a browser plugin called Debias Yourself that Airbnb users can deploy in Chrome to scrape names and photos off of the home-rental site. “That isn’t quite what Airbnb intended, but it’s your computer, and it’s your right to configure it as you see fit.” 
 
 Debias Yourself is available for download on Google’s Chrome Web Store.
– Airbnb's commitment to building a connection between hosts and guests in the interest of safety is actually helping them discriminate against each other, the Washington Post reports. Harvard researchers sent out 6,400 requests to Airbnb hosts in Los Angeles, St. Louis, DC, Baltimore, and Dallas using fake accounts. The accounts were identical except for the names, which were either stereotypically white or black. The study —published Wednesday—found guests with "black" names were 16% less likely to be accepted. That's about the same level of discrimination found in everything from the job market to classified ad rates, the Post reports. "This is absolutely not a story about how people are bigots on Airbnb," study coauthor Michael Luca says. "This is entirely about the choices that online platforms make that either facilitate or prevent discrimination." Researchers found discrimination came from all hosts—black, white, female, male, expensive properties, cheap properties, etc. The Post reports the only exception was black female hosts, who didn't appear to discriminate against black female guests. According to the study, this discrimination came at a financial cost, as hosts who turned down guests only found replacements 35% of the time. But the researchers aren't just pointing out the problem, they're helping solve it. According to Forbes, they partnered with some computer scientists to create a downloadable tool called Debias Yourself. Airbnb users with Chrome can download the tool, and Debias Yourself will scrub the names and photos of hosts and guests from the site.