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viridianriver · 9 months
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KOKOBOT - The Airbnb-Owned Tech Startup - Data Mining Tumblr Users' Mental Health Crises for "Content"
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I got this message from a bot, and honestly? If I was a bit younger and not such a jaded bitch with a career in tech, I might have given it an honest try. I spent plenty of time in a tough situation without access to any mental health resources as a teen, and would have been sucked right in.
Chatting right from your phone, and being connected with people who can help you? Sounds nice. Especially if you believe the testimonials they spam you with (tw suicide / self harm mention in below images)
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But I was getting a weird feeling, so I went to read the legalese.
I couldn't even get through the fine-print it asked me to read and agree to, without it spamming the hell out of me. Almost like they expect people to just hit Yes? But I'm glad I stopped to read, because:
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What you say on there won't be confidential. (And for context, I tried it out and the things people were looking for help with? I didn't even feel comfortable sharing here as examples, it was all so deeply personal and painful)
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Also, what you say on there? Is now...
Koko's intellectual property - giving them the right to use it in any way they see fit, including
Publicly performing or displaying your "content" (also known as your mental health crisis) in any media format and in any media channel without limitation
Do this indefinitely after you end your account with them
Sell / share this "content" with other businesses
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Any harm you come to using Koko? That's on you.
And Koko won't take responsibility for anything someone says to you on there (which is bleak when people are using it to spread Christianity to people in crisis)
I was curious about their business model. They're a venture-capitol based tech startup, owned by Airbnb, the famous mental health professionals with a focus on ethical business practices./s They're also begging for donations despite having already been given 2.5 million dollars in research funding. (If you want a deep dive on why people throw crazy money at tech startups, see my other post here)
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They also use the data they gather from users to conduct research and publish papers. I didn't find them too interesting - other than as a good case study of "People tend to find what they are financially incentivized to find". Predictably, Koko found that Kokobot was beneficial to its users.
So yeah, being a dumbass with too much curiosity, I decided to use the Airbnb-owned Data-Mining Mental Health Chatline anyway. And if you thought it was dangerous sounding from the disclaimers? Somehow it got worse.
(trigger warning / discussions of child abuse / sexual abuse / suicide / violence below the cut - please don't read if you're not in a good place to hear about negligence around pretty horrific topics.)
I first messed around with the available options, but then I asked it about something obviously concerning, saying I had a gun and was going to shoot myself. It responded... Poorly. Imagine the vibes of trying to cancel Comcast, when you're suicidal.
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Anyway, I tried again to ask for help about something else that would be concerning enough for any responsible company to flag. School was one of their main options, which seems irresponsible - do you really think a child in crisis would read that contract?
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I told it about a teacher at school trying to "be my boyfriend", and it immediately suggested I help someone else while I wait for help. I was honestly concerned that it wasn't flagged before connecting. Especially when I realized it was connecting me to children.
I first got someone who seemed to be a child in an abusive home. (Censored for their privacy.) I declined to talk to them because despite being an adult and in an OK mental place - I knew I'm not equipped to counsel a kid through that. If my act of being another kid in crisis was real? Holy shit.
Remember- if my BS was true, that kid would be being "helped" by an actively suicidal kid who's also being groomed by a teacher. Their pipeline for "helpers" is the same group of people looking for help.
I skipped a number of messages, and they mostly seemed to be written by children and young adults with nowhere else to turn. Plus one scary one from an adult whose "problem" was worrying that they'd been inappropriate with a female student, asking her to pull her skirt down "a little" in front of the class. Koko paired this person with someone reporting that they were a child being groomed by a teacher. Extremely dangerous, and if this was an episode of Black Mirror? I'd say it was a little too on the nose to be believable.
I also didn't get the option to get help without being asked... Er... Harassed... to help others. If I declined, I'd get the next request for help, and the next. If I ignored it, I got spammed by the "We lost you there!" messages, asking if I'd like to pick up where I left off, seeing others' often triggering messages while waiting for help, including seriously homophobic shit. I was going into this as an experiment, starting from a good mental place, and being an adult with coping skills from an actual therapist, and I still felt triggered by a lot of what I read. I can't imagine the experience someone actually in crisis would be having.
My message was starting to feel mild in comparison to what some people were sharing - but despite that I was feeling very uneasy about my message being shown to children. There didn't seem to be a way to take it back either.
Then I got a reply about my issue. It was very kind and well meaning, but VERY horrifying. Because it seemed to be written by a child, or someone too young to understand that "Do have feelings for the teacher who's grooming you? If you don't, you should go talk to him." Is probably THE most dangerous advice possible.
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Not judging the author - I get the impression they're probably a child seeking help themselves and honestly feel horribly guilty my BS got sent to a young person and they wanted to reply. Because WTF. No kid should be in that position to answer my fucked up question or any of the others like it.
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Anyway, what can you do if this concerns you, or you've had a difficult experience on Koko, with no support from them or Tumblr?
To reach Tumblr, who officially partners with Koko?
Send a message to Tumblr Support describing your concerns with their partnership with Kokobot
Report kokobot to Tumblr's abuse hotline describing your experience with KokoBot, especially if you are a minor who suffered harm, as they have a legal responsibility to address that.
To get Koko's attention:
Get on their LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/kokocares/) and comment on their posts! You may also want to tag the company's co-founders in your comments - their accounts are listed on the company page.
There's no way to reach support through chat, and commenting on a company's LinkedIn posts / tagging the people responsible is the best way to get a quick response to a sensitive issue - as their investors and research funders follow those posts, and companies take it seriously if safety issues are brought up in front of the people giving them millions of dollars.
Request support on Koko's Discord - FYI they will allow you to file a ticket privately, which the moderators say will reach the staff. But you may be muted or banned for trying to discuss concerns with Koko as a company or the safety of kokobot in the public channels, which also cuts you off from the ability to file a ticket.
To report it to the FCC for likely violating the COPPA law, regarding minors' safety and privacy online:
See Reblogs for further info & reporting instructions: Detailed description of COPPA law and Kokobot's presumed violations, plus detailed reporting instructions
But quick links: FCC reporting website and email hotline: [email protected]
Seriously, if you've taken the time to read this far, please please please take one more minute to file a report! It won't get addressed if all we do is reblog this, we need to get this in front of Tumblr Staff / The FCC / Koko's investors to get this meaningfully addressed.
Blocking and reporting the bot as spam isn't enough IMO - people have been doing that for years from the looks of the tag
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Reccomended reading in reblogs:
dropattackbear's discovery of what Koko is using the harvested data for (Machine Learning training data for automated content moderation services)
winderlylandchime (a licenced clinical psychologist's) explanation of privacy / ethics considerations around mental health services
thatsmimi's post on the dangers of letting minors act as a suicide / self-harm resource
My additions on their investors, leadership board, and their current job opening
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Legal Disclaimer since tech companies LOVE lawsuits:
The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual. This text is for entertainment purposes only, and is not meant to be referenced for legal, business, or investment purposes. This text is based on publically available information. Sources may contain factual errors. The analysis provided in this text may contain factual errors, miscalculations, or misunderstandings.
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Housing is a labor issue
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There's a reason Reagan declared war on unions before he declared war on everything else – environmental protection, health care, consumer rights, financial regulation. Unions are how working people fight for a better world for all of us. They're how everyday people come together to resist oligarchy, extraction and exploitation.
Take the 2019 LA teachers' strike. As Jane McAlevey writes in A Collective Bargain, the LA teachers didn't just win higher pay for their members! They also demanded (and got) an end to immigration sweeps of parents waiting for their kids at the school gate; a guarantee of green space near every public school in the city; and on-site immigration counselors in LA schools:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/23/a-collective-bargain/
Unionization is enjoying an historic renaissance. The Hot Labor Summer transitioned to an Eternal Labor September, and it's still going strong, with UAW president Shawn Fain celebrating his members victory over the Big Three automakers by calling for a 2028 general strike:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/uaw-general-strike-no-class
The rising labor movement has powerful allies in the Biden Administration. NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is systematically gutting the "union avoidance" playbook. She's banned the use of temp-work app blacklists that force workers to cross picket lines:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/30/computer-says-scab/#instawork
She's changed the penalty for bosses who violate labor law during union drives. It used to be the boss would pay a fine, which was an easy price to pay in exchange for killing your workers' union. Now, the penalty is automatic recognition of the union:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth
And while the law doesn't allow Abruzzo to impose a contract on companies that refuse to bargain their unions, she's set to force those companies to honor other employers' union contracts until they agree to a contract with their own workers:
https://onlabor.org/gc-abruzzo-just-asked-the-nlrb-to-overturn-ex-cell-o-heres-why-that-matters/
She's also nuking TRAPs, the deals that force workers to repay their employers for their "training expenses" if they have the audacity to quit and get a better job somewhere else:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/14/prop-22-never-again/#norms-code-laws-markets
(As with every aspect of the Biden White House, its labor policy is contradictory and self-defeating, with other Biden appointees working to smash worker power, including when Biden broke the railworkers' strike:)
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it
A surging labor movement opens up all kinds of possibilities for a better world. Writing for the Law and Political Economy Project, UNITE Here attorney Zoe Tucker makes the case for unions as a way out of America's brutal housing crisis:
https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-unions-should-join-the-housing-fight/
She describes how low-waged LA hotel workers have been pushed out of neighborhoods close to their jobs, with UNITE Here members commuting three hours in each direction, starting their work-days at 3AM in order to clock in on time:
https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1669088899769987079
UNITE Here members are striking against 50 hotels in LA and Orange County, and their demands include significant cost-of-living raises. But more money won't give them back the time they give up to those bruising daily commutes. For that, unions need to make housing itself a demand.
As Tucker writes, most workers are tenants and vice-versa. What's more, bad landlords are apt to be bad bosses, too. Stepan Kazaryan, the same guy who owns the strip club whose conditions were so bad that it prompted the creation of Equity Strippers NoHo, the first strippers' union in a generation, is also a shitty landlord whose tenants went on a rent-strike:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/20/the-missing-links/#plunderphonics
So it was only natural that Kazaryan's tenants walked the picket line with the Equity Stripper Noho workers:
https://twitter.com/glendaletenants/status/1733290276599570736?s=46
While scumbag bosses/evil landlords like Kazaryan deal out misery retail, one apartment building at a time, the wholesale destruction of workers' lives comes from private equity giants who are the most prolific source of TRAPs, robo-scabbing apps, illegal union busting, and indefinite contract delays – and these are the very same PE firms that are buying up millions of single-family homes and turning them into slums:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords
Tucker's point is that when a worker clocks out of their bad job, commutes home for three hours, and gets back to their black-mold-saturated, overpriced apartment to find a notice of a new junk fee (like a surcharge for paying your rent in cash, by check, or by direct payment), they're fighting the very same corporations.
Unions who defend their workers' right to shelter do every tenant a service. A coalition of LA unions succeeded in passing Measure ULA, which uses a surcharge on real estate transactions over $5m to fund "the largest municipal housing program in the country":
https://unitedtohousela.com/app/uploads/2022/05/LA_City_Affordable_Housing_Petition_H.pdf
LA unions are fighting for rules to limit Airbnbs and other platforms that transform the city's rental stock into illegal, unlicensed hotels:
https://upgo.lab.mcgill.ca/publication/strs-in-los-angeles-2022/Wachsmuth_LA_2022.pdf
And the hotel workers organized under UNITE Here are fighting their own employers: the hoteliers who are aggressively buying up residences, evicting their long-term tenants, tearing down the building and putting up a luxury hotel. They got LA council to pass a law requiring hotels to build new housing to replace any residences they displace:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-28/airbnb-operators-would-need-police-permit-in-l-a-under-proposed-law
UNITE Here is bargaining for a per-room hotel surcharge to fund housing specifically for hotel workers, so the people who change the sheets and clean the toilets don't have to waste six hours a day commuting to do so.
Labor unions and tenant unions have a long history of collaboration in the USA. NYC's first housing coop was midwifed by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1927. The Penn South coop was created by the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. The 1949 Federal Housing Act passed after American unions pushed hard for it:
http://www.peterdreier.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Labors-Love-Lost.pdf
It goes both ways. Strong unions can create sound housing – and precarious housing makes unions weaker. Remember during the Hollywood writers' strike, when an anonymous studio ghoul told the press the plans was to "allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses?"
Vienna has the most successful housing in any major city in the world. It's the city where people of every income and background live in comfort without being rent-burdened and without worry about eviction, mold, or leaks. That's the legacy of Red Vienna, the Austrian period of Social Democratic Workers' Party rule and built vast tracts of high-quality public housing. The system was so robust that it rebounded after World War II and continues to this day:
https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/
Today, the rest of the world is mired in a terrible housing crisis. It's not merely that the rent's too damned high (though it is) – housing precarity is driving dangerous political instability:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
Turning the human necessity of shelter into a market commodity is a failure. The economic orthodoxy that insists that public housing, rent control, and high-density zoning will lead to less housing has failed. rent control works:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset
Leaving housing to the market only produces losers. If you have the bad luck to invest everything you have into a home in a city that contracts, you're wiped out. If you have the bad luck into invest everything into a home in a "superstar city" where prices go up, you also lose, because your city becomes uninhabitable and your children can't afford to live there:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/27/lethal-dysfunction/#yimby
A strong labor movement is the best chance we have for breaking the housing deadlock. And housing is just for starters. Labor is the key to opening every frozen-in-place dysfunction. Take care work: the aging, increasingly chronically ill American population is being tortured and murdered by private equity hospices, long-term care facilities and health services that have been rolled up by the same private equity firms that destroyed work and housing:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
In her interview with Capital & Main's Jessica Goodheart, National Domestic Workers Alliance president Ai-jen Poo describes how making things better for care workers will make things better for everyone:
https://prospect.org/labor/2023-12-13-labor-leader-ai-jen-poo-interview/
Care work is a "triple dignity investment": first, it makes life better for the worker (most often a woman of color), then, it allows family members of people who need care to move into higher paid work; and of course, it makes life better for people who need care: "It delivers human potential and agency. It delivers a future workforce. It delivers quality of life."
The failure to fund care work is a massive driver of inequality. America's sole federal public provision for care is Medicaid, which only kicks in after a family it totally impoverished. Funding care with tax increases polls high with both Democrats and Republicans, making it good politics:
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/4/7/voters-support-investing-in-the-care-economy
Congress stripped many of the care provisions from Build Back Better, missing a chance for an "unprecedented, transformational investment in care." But the administrative agencies picked up where Congress failed, following a detailed executive order that identifies existing, previously unused powers to improve care in America. The EO "expands access to care, supports family caregivers and improves wages and conditions for the workforce":
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2023/04/18/executive-order-on-increasing-access-to-high-quality-care-and-supporting-caregivers/
States are also filling the void. Washington just created a long-term care benefit:
https://apnews.com/article/washington-long-term-care-tax-disability-cb54b04b025223dbdba7199db1d254e4
New Mexicans passed a ballot initiative that establishes permanent funding for child care:
https://www.cwla.org/new-mexico-votes-for-child-care/
New York care workers won a $3/hour across the board raise:
https://inequality.org/great-divide/new-york-budget-fair-pay-home-care/
The fight is being led by women of color, and they're kicking ass – and they're doing it through their unions. Worker power is the foundation that we build a better world upon, and it's surging.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table
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mysharona1987 · 5 months
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one-time-i-dreamt · 7 months
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Jacksepticeye was in my bathtub. When I asked why, he said that he thought my house was an AirBNB.
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Xavier Olivé is the last person renting a flat in a building in the Eixample [neighbourhood of Barcelona, Catalonia], after a Dutch company has bought the whole building. He denounces that the owners have expelled all the neighbours who always lived here and now all the other flats are touristic or luxury apartments.
Despite being saddened by the situation and fearing they might expel him as well, he is decided to resist because he doesn't want to leave.
By Barcelona TV. English subtitles added by me.
Sadly, this is a common story in Barcelona and other cities and towns affected by touristic massification.
We urgently need laws that regulate housing so that locals aren't massively expelled to make room for tourists or second homes for rich foreigners, and to stop vulture funds from buying up huge amounts of property to raise the prices. But right now, as a tourist, the most important thing you can do to stop kicking people out of their homes is easy: NEVER, NEVER STAY AT AN AIRBNB, AN UNCONTROLLED TOURISTIC APARTMENT, OR SIMILAR. Always stay at certified hotels (or, of course, with friends and family if you have them there).
If you rent an apartment that is being marketed to tourists where there's a housing crisis for locals, or an Airbnb anywhere, you're effectively destroying the local community.
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moodboardmix · 1 month
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The coolest Airbnb in California !
Pioneertown, San Bernardino County, California, United States,
Courtesy: Cover
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returquoise · 4 months
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Kovan viikon ilta is a Finnish political satire show, concentrating on current events. Sometimes other stuff makes it in.
(Season 2, episode 4, December 2nd 2023)
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mapsontheweb · 7 months
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Every Airbnb Listing in Megacities
by u/itsinbacklog
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high-quality-tiktoks · 11 months
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It’s time we all admit that staying in a hotel is better than vacationing in someone’s spare bedroom🏡🚪🧳🙅🏼‍♀️
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ginger-by-the-sea · 17 days
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#ginger-by-the-sea🦞
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oldfarmhouse · 6 months
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𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐰𝐚𝐲
https://lobsterandswan.com
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blacktabbygames · 8 months
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come stay at a cozy antebellum estate in the heart of appalachia do not make eye contact with the owner. do not use the kitchen. nightly fee: $278 hospitality fees: $150 cleaning fee: $650 taxes: $67.59
less than several people have died in this room. private bathroom
book your dream getaway today
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tinyhousetown · 9 months
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Casal Chalet
Treviso, Brazil
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thenordroom · 10 months
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Rustic Wooden Elements in a Stylish Tulum Airbnb
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one-time-i-dreamt · 3 months
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My parents were quitting their jobs and making the house an Airbnb. They refused to listen to me about how horrible of an idea this was and insisted the company was not in fact failing and they would make a lot of money. My dad would not tell me where they planned on living if the house was an Airbnb.
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