Airbnb clarifies rules: No class-action lawsuits
Airbnb is asking all its hosts and guests to agree to updated rules highlighting an existing policy that disputes must be handled by binding arbitration, an increasingly common tactic by corporations to forestall lawsuits.
[...] while the company already had said it might check if users have criminal backgrounds or are registered sex offenders, it now asks them to proactively agree to such checks at Airbnb’s discretion.
“They prohibit class-action lawsuits and have been doing for a while,” said Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco lawyer and longtime critic of mandatory arbitration.
The inability to band together for class-action lawsuits is more significant for other tech company users such as Uber drivers, for instance, he said.
Airbnb added a new clause for users to “agree and authorize us to use your personal information, such as your full name and date of birth, to obtain ... reports” from public records of criminal convictions or sex offender registrations.
The previous terms said, in all-caps language buried at the end of the document, that Airbnb may conduct such checks at its sole discretion, but didn’t ask users to agree to the checks.
Share Better, a group that opposes Airbnb’s presence in New York and other cities, maintains an online map showing the locations of registered sex offenders and building-code violations in New York.
The point was to show a lack of safety near the informal rentals, but since offenders and violations were so prevalent, the upshot was that the “map makes one wonder where it is safe to stay in the city,” as Mashable wrote.
Share Better didn’t uncover evidence that any Airbnb hosts actually are registered sex offenders.