How The Hell Is This My Fault?

Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by bugsy on Saturday July 30, 2011 @03:49PM (#2826536)

I think there is a pretty good legal argument that they had a duty to know the actual identity of each party. They failed to do that. When her house was trashed the first thing she did is ask them the real identity of the person who rented and then they revealed they had absolutely no idea whatsoever. This is a huge surprise to me, it was to her, and it is to everybody that isn't trying to defend this company's massive incompetence. The fact that they don't know the identity of the parties is openly misrepresented by their materials which indicate that the transaction is safe and intentionally try to distract the customer with jokes about the difficulty of moving grand pianos, which are an item few people would have in their house anyway.

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Re:How The Hell Is This My Fault? by kragen on Saturday July 30, 2011 @03:55PM (#2826558)

> I think there is a pretty good legal argument that they had a duty to know the actual identity of each party.

I think that's absurd. Would you say the same thing about Craigslist?

> The fact that they don't know the identity of the parties is openly misrepresented by their materials which indicate that the transaction is safe and intentionally try to distract the customer with jokes about the difficulty of moving grand pianos

That's not how I read it at all. They don't claim to know the identity of the other party; they claim that the transaction is safe. Which, it appears, it is. If they've had 2 million nights booked, that's maybe a quarter of a million bookings, and (they claim) this is the first time anything like this has happened. That's pretty safe!

I read the joke about the grand piano as an admission that the only thing that's preventing people from using Airbnb to rob people is that robbing people is generally hard and unprofitable.

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