Judge Orders Airbnb to Release 17k Listings to Investigators
Summary
New York City in particular has been trying to limit companies like Airbnb, HomeAway, and VRBO, claiming they add to the city’s housing problems and allow people to transform homes into illegal hotels. On May 14, Airbnb offered an olive branch of sorts, agreeing to “give city officials partially anonymized host and reservation data for more than 17,000 listings,” in response to a subpoena, according to an article in Wired. Even before the 2015 changes to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, this claim was a boilerplate response when large data sets were requested. The amendments to Rule 26’s language on scope made this claim easier to prove, with the data request deadline falling 30 days sooner, along with the requirement of specificity and relevance. In the past, corporations often worked in good faith with law enforcement, while avoiding the release their users’ data from a direct court order (e.g. Craigslist dropped their personal ads section in lieu of a pending Human Trafficking bill to avoid the hassle all together), and it seems that Airbnb’s offer of anonymized data was an attempt to play the middle: give enough information to show cooperation with the investigation while protecting user privacy.
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