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How Your Airbnb Host Can Use Nest For Surveillance

This article is more than 10 years old.

I once got a pitch from an IP camera company that was trying to hawk its product as a solution for users of Airbnb: "Install our cameras so you can make sure strangers aren't doing anything weird in your apartment." Or, depending on your level of voyeurism, it might be a great way to see people doing weird things in your apartment. Besides being creepy, it struck me as likely illegal if the presence of the cameras weren't disclosed to the people staying in the apartments.

Entrepreneur Jon Wheatley describes a much less creepy way to passively monitor those staying in an apartment he rents out on Airbnb: the smart thermostat Nest.

Wheatley wrote an interesting post about how much money he's made through Airbnb -- $13,608 profit over a year -- after investing $50,000 in an apartment in Las Vegas. He offers a bunch of tips and hacks for being an Airbnb hotelier. Wheatley has the apartment solely to rent it out short-term (which could attract the attention of Nevada regulators if they're anything like New York's). He lives in San Francisco and manages the apartment remotely with help from a woman who cleans it. So how does he know when people come and leave? Through the thermostat:

Nest has a great “auto away” feature that activates when nobody walks past it in a predetermined amount of time. This turns off all heating and cooling when nobody is in the unit and you and your guests don’t need to think or worry about it. The cost of a nest probably pays for itself in a couple of months with this feature alone. This also lets you login to your nest account and see if a guest has arrived safely or not without having to bother them.

A quick search of the site shows many Airbnb listings with Nests. As homes evolve to be aware of and responsive to us, they know we're there. And anyone with access to their data streams knows we're there too.

This passive surveillance is obviously much preferable from a privacy perspective than in-house surveillance cameras. The Nest after all won't be taking any scandalous photos or video of you; it just knows how hot you like it.

Via Digg