No, this is a ham fisted marketing initiative pretending to be about security. Why they didn't just buy 'likes' with coupons like every other scummy company out there, I don't know.
1. How long has your account been active?
2. Does your account have a human-like pattern of activity?
3. Do your social graphs overlap realistically? Are you Facebook friends with your LinkedIn connections?
Etc. It'd take an extremely patient scammer to fake that sort of data. It can be done, of course, it's not trivial.
Can we please please please stop with the 'anecdote of 1 = data' and 'I do it like this and so do my friends (who are self-selected to be as much like me as possible)' arguments. It does not matter what you do, nor does it matter what you think. Businesses have much more data on this than the vast majority of HN readers, and while it's nice to think that they're all stupid in the 'I am so much smarter' sense, it is most likely not true. If Airbnb had, over the course of testing their validation approach against the first let's say 1000 users found out that the majority had little to no overlap in their social graphs between social networks, do you think they would keep using it this way? Clearly the answer is no, which leads to the prima facie conclusion that your generalization of your own behavior to the population at large is flat-out wrong. I'm not saying there is no way it could be that indeed most people have little overlap, just that the evidence we have so far, plus some reasonable thinking, points to the other conclusion.
Of course, if you do have (or can point to) data (i.e., not anecdotes, not 'I think', but hard data, obtained in a methodologically sound way) to the contrary, that would be a valuable addition to this discussion. All these "I don't do it like that so it sucks!" replies are just noise, and that was (in a passive-aggressive way) one of the underlying points in my reply.
On the whole I agree with you. Until the bot I described actually exists, social profiles are a pretty good identity check. No reason not to use them whilst they're still worth something.
It stretches credulity to suggest Facebook and LinkedIn are better ID checks than reviews from paying AirBnB users, which is what AirBnB's position seems to be.
Besides which they have your credit card on file. Why not just match that up with the scanned in driver's licence / passport?
To note, the way airbnb has rolled this out is quite surprising (mandatory sampling of users, disrupting active reservations, etc). Starting to wonder if there are any decent competitors out there.
Before we get into arguments about the validity of libertarianism...I think it shouldn't be shocking that when a company becomes large (with more at stake), they have to act in ways that will be overbearing in comparison to what they were before.
The quoted complaint above could easily apply to, let's say, the Apple iOS store, in which decisions are made heavily in favor of playing it safe and clean. I would like to argue that I'm wise enough to make my own choices about downloading immoral/unpleasant apps...and I'm entitled to make that argument. However, I can't argue that this...ahem, proactive policy prevents a great many shit-fests that might otherwise arise were it not in place. And I really can't dispute that Apple so far been wildly successful in the app marketplace.
Likewise, from Airbnb's perspective, I can see why they've made the calculation that proactively preventing scammers is overall, a good business decision. Because a few disasters from slightly foolish customers is enough to doom the entire ship.