<nettime> Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score’

[nettime's avid reader <nettime@kein.org>]

www.engadget.com
/2020/01/17/your-online-activity-effectively-social-credit-score-airbnb/

Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score’

Kaylen Ward's Twitter fundraiser for the Australian bushfire relief has
ended. The Los Angeles-based model said she raised $1 million (by
comparison Jeff Bezos donated $690,000). At the start of Ms. Ward's
successful donation drive she had three Instagram accounts — none of
which were part of the campaign.

Despite that, Instagram kicked her off all three accounts, saying her
behavior on Twitter violated Instagram's sexually suggestive content
guidelines. On Twitter, Ms. Ward -- as The Naked Philanthropist --
offered a privately-sent nude photo to those who provided verifiable
proof of donation to organizations including Australian Red Cross and
The Koala Hospital. Her fundraiser complied with Twitter's Terms of Service.

If the thought of companies stalking you online and denying you services
because they think you're a sinner gives you the Orwell Anti-Sex League
chills, you should know that Airbnb just asked Instagram to hold its beer.

The same day Ms. Ward launched her fundraising campaign, reports emerged
detailing Airbnb's new "trait analyzer" algorithms that compile data
dossiers on users, decides whether you've been bad or good, gives you a
score, and then "flag and investigate suspicious activity before it
happens."

The Evening Standard reported on Airbnb's patent for AI that crawls and
scrapes everything it can find on you, "including social media for
traits such as 'conscientiousness and openness' against the usual credit
and identity checks and what it describes as 'secure third-party
databases'."

They added, "Traits such as "neuroticism and involvement in crimes" and
"narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy" are "perceived as
untrustworthy." Further:

It uses artificial intelligence to mark down those found to be
"associated" with fake social network profiles, or those who have given
any false details. The patent also suggests users are scored poorly if
keywords, images or video associated with them are involved with drugs
or alcohol, hate websites or organisations, or sex work.

It adds that people "involved in pornography" or who have "authored
online content with negative language" will be marked down.

When reached for comment, Airbnb provided Engadget two different
responses from two different people. The first was boilerplate,
describing its "trait analyzer" patent that Airbnb sent to press: the
company claimed it did not "necessarily implement" all or part of its
patent filings.

Engadget also asked Airbnb for comment regarding its profiling users
based on their offsite behaviors and its denial of services to customers
who work in legal adult entertainment.

Airbnb's second response (via email) was to ask to speak off the record
(on the phone). Engadget declined off-the-record comment. This Airbnb
spokesperson emailed again, stating:

Regarding your question on sex work, we do not allow sex work in Airbnb
listings and have policies in place to enforce this rule... We take
action to remove accounts that we believe to be associated with sex
trafficking and child exploitation regardless of whether the activty
[SIC] is occuring [SIC] in Airbnb listings, and we also work
cooperatively with law enforcement authorities in such cases.

Yeah, that wasn't our question on sex work. But the statement is
revealing in that it looks like Airbnb is bending over backwards to not
say it's indiscriminately discriminating against sex workers -- while
it's becoming widely documented that Airbnb does exactly that.

"Airbnb for everyone" (not)

Adult performer Cadence Lux's Airbnb account was suddenly terminated
this month. Last week she went to create a new account under her legal,
non-performer name, yet Airbnb knew it was her. The company denied her
an account, saying Lux's " information is associated with activities
that pose a risk to the Airbnb community."

Guilt by association, certainly. But it's also the direct opposite of
what Airbnb told local press when bragging about its profiling and
surveillance tools this week.

It's no wonder The Observer recently reported that Sex Workers Are at
the Forefront of the Fight Against Mass Surveillance and Big Tech.
"Algorithms are affecting people, and disproportionately they're going
to affect people at the margins," Analyst and researcher Bardot Smith
said. "So queer people, people of color, sex working people. Obviously,
the intersections of all these identities, and basically it comes down
to people that they have determined don't deserve access to money and
resources."

Needless to say, Lux was not using Airbnb for anything other than having
a safe place to sleep. It's almost like everyone forgets porn is a legal
job in the United States. Okay Airbnb, we get it! You like to refuse
service to adult women who engage in consensual activities of bodily
autonomy that have nothing to do with your service because you don't
approve, or you don't believe women, or whatever. But hey, I digress.

They don't need to. According to Bloomberg, Silicon Valley startup
Trooly began working with Airbnb in 2015; in 2017 Airbnb purchased
Trooly's intellectual property and engineering team. Airbnb's email to
Engadget confirmed that its problematic patent making headlines this
month was part of the Trooly acquisition.

At the time, Trooly had two serious competitors in the AI-powered, big
data "background check" space: UK startup Onfido and US-based Checkr.

Trooly was late to the game and raised less funding, but the three men
who created it offered something TechCrunch described as "drastically
different." Namely, scraping everything about you online, letting AI
decide if you're good or bad, and applying predictive policing.

"The way we do that is we use public and legally permissible digital
footprints," Trooly co-founder and CEO Savi Baveja told press in 2016.
"In about 30 seconds — using very little input information about the
individual or business — we return a scorecard that does three things:
it verifies whether the input information is authentic; it screens for
any relevant and seriously antisocial or pro-social prior behavior; and
then it runs a series of predictive models on that footprint to say what
is the propensity of this individual or small business for future
antisocial or pro-social behavior."

The most famous social credit system in operation is that used by
China's government. It "monitors millions of individuals' behavior
(including social media and online shopping), determines how moral or
immoral it is, and raises or lowers their "citizen score" accordingly,"
reported Atlantic in 2018.

"Those with a high score are rewarded, while those with a low score are
punished." Now we know the same AI systems are used for predictive
policing to round up Muslim Uighurs and other minorities into
concentration camps under the guise of preventing extremism.

Trooly — nee Airbnb — is combining social credit scores with predictive
policing. Tools like PredPol use AI that combines data points and
historical events, factors like race and location, digital footprints
and crime statistics, to predict likelihood of when and where crimes
will occur (as well as victims and perpetrators). It's no secret that
predictive policing replicates and perpetuates discrimination.

Combine this with companies like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and yes,
Airbnb deciding what legal behaviors are acceptable for service, and now
we're looking at groups of historically marginalized people being denied
involvement in mainstream economic, political, cultural and social
activities — at scale.

This week AP reported that Facebook and Instagram are doing exactly
that. "Activists, sex therapists, abuse survivors, artists and sex
educators," are being unfairly censored by both services. "And it's no
small matter for them. Artists can be suddenly left without their
audience, businesses without access to their customers and vulnerable
people without a support network ... it means that a company in Silicon
Valley, whose online platforms have become not only our town squares but
diaries, magazines, art galleries and protest platforms, gets final say
on matters of free speech and self-expression."

The point is, we can write this all off as Instagram and Airbnb being
shitty and sexist (spoiler: they are), and being a big bunch of
hypocrites about stated values (also true). But also not actually caring
about whom they harm and how they're trading our future freedoms and
rights and chances at equality for their selfish entitlement to live out
their lives of repressed and eventually volatile desperation in luxury
(yep).

Or we can grab every chance we can to hold them to account.

Last year I marched in the 2019 SF Pride Parade with the Transgender Law
Center. In early morning downtown San Francisco, we assembled on the
same block as Airbnb — their float was across the street.

The sun was beginning its morning arc, and we were cold in the shadows
of condo and office towers belonging to Salesforce, others occupied by
Facebook, Google, and more. I live in the Castro; I'd looked at Airbnbs
in my neighborhood for friends visiting for the celebration. The
listings I got were monthly. Rentals that, to me, belong on the open,
competitive market offering tenant-protecting agreements.

But I was thinking about a queer friend of mine who is a sex worker,
recently driven out of SF by the high rents and scarcity. One year after
Airbnb started working with Trooly she was banned from Airbnb after
three years of stellar reviews from hosts. She is a sex worker and queer
activist, and had never done sex work in any Airbnb. Airbnb did not
respond to requests for comment on her expulsion.

I was preparing for the Pride march, my group was making sure everyone
had sunscreen, taking selfies, and not gonna lie, in today's political
climate we were low-key stressed someone would try and pull a
mass-shooter situation. We were there because it mattered more than all
the things any shooter might believe in.

I looked at the Airbnb float and stuck a pin in it.

I realized that by Airbnb's presence in San Francisco Pride and doing
old-school discrimination against queer sex workers, that Airbnb didn't
know the ground they walked on in a terrible way. Airbnb's presence in
SF Pride was either harmfully ignorant or disgustingly repudiating the
fact that sex workers were a critical part of Stonewall and Compton. The
two riots indisputably critical to the advancement of LGBTQ rights
leading to the fact that there are any Pride parades in the US at all.

So this year I'm going to find Airbnb's float and ask: which is it?



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