Incident 183: Airbnb's Trustworthiness Algorithm Allegedly Banned Users without Explanation, and Discriminated against Sex Workers

Description: Airbnb allegedly considered publicly available data on users to gauge their trustworthiness via algorithmic assessment of personality and behavioral traits, resulting in unexplained bans and discriminatory bans against sex workers.

Tools

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Alleged: Airbnb and Trooly developed an AI system deployed by Airbnb, which harmed sex workers and Airbnb users.

Incident Stats

Incident ID
183
Report Count
6
Incident Date
2017-07-01
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.