On the other hand, you could argue that the reason they have a “no daytime visitors” rule in the first place is because they have no way of knowing how manhunt visitors there are so they just make the rule “none” so they don’t have to try to provide how many were there at once.

If you could accurately know how many people there are and when they are there, you could have a more reasonable rule like “no more than 3 guests during the day and they have to leave by 9pm” or something.

I think you're being disingenuous in that you're only looking at half the story. I don't use AirBnB either as a host or a guest, so I may be missing something here, but to me, this seems to fall squarely into "this is why we can't have nice things" territory.

Of course, if you have someone over for coffee, there probably is no issue. Of course, if you have many people over for a crazy party, there will probably be a boatload of issues.

The problem is there are plenty of dishonest people who'll try to skirt their responsibilities in the in-between situations. Maybe it's difficult to hide that you've had 50 people over. But if you're renting for, say, 4 people and you have 10 more people over? I'd guess it's not directly evident. So if those people aren't hell-bent on thrashing the place, but you know, shit happens? Perhaps the guest will try to say that the couch already had a wine stain, or the dishes were already chipped, or whatever. And if a neighbor complained about the noise? There were just four of us, we kept it reasonable, but we can't be completely mute.

So of course hosts will try to hedge against these behaviors. And, of course, people trying to be reasonable will get the short straw. Next thing you know, water will be found to be wet or something crazy like that.

Short-term rentals really need to be taxed accordingly to compensate for the cost of their externalities (loss of single-family houses in the market). I'm not sure how many localities do this.

100%. In less than a decade this so-called innovation went from "I want to host travelers in my spare bedroom to help make rent" to "I want to buy up homes in popular areas during a housing crunch and pimp them out to frat parties". I have lived next to a property by one of these "superhosts" and it's hell on the neighborhood.

STRs are a disgusting and tasteless business and I avoid staying in them at all costs

Of course, but most AirBnB hosts want a product, not a project.

Either that or some ESP32. It also includes a smart smoke alarm and noise meter. But property managers aren't going to want to roll their own solution to this.

Five bucks says it's just an ESP32 with some sensors wired up to it going to "their" cloud. That's all they all end up being, just in a fancy package buttoned up for the end user.

I ripped apart a https://restsensor.com/ "hotel air quality sensor" I got on eBay and it ended up being just that: an ESP32 hooked to a Sensiron SEN55.

I'd assume it's because it's easier to look for an Apple MAC prefix than trying to figure out if some other device is a phone or not.

But with MAC randomization (both wifi and Bluetooth), I'm not sure what they are doing here that would effectively sort iPhones from other devices doing the same.

None of the developers ever saw one, or they firmly believe focusing on iOS makes the product more 'luxe'

Absolutely, maybe 15 years ago, and it was / is used by shops to detect recurring visitors and get a better understanding of their behavior.

It’s also why anonymization of wifi started being pushed by Apple et al, which still does provide a stable client id but that’s only being broadcast as part of the DHCP handshake, which cannot be used here.

yes -- I think xfinity uses it to implement this: https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion

Green text ppl aren't getting invited

I'm guessing it's because iPhones are easier to characterize over dozens of different android MAC address prefixes.

But with MAC address randomization, I don't recall Apple doing anything different than other vendors so not sure what they are detecting that an Android wouldn't reveal as well.

Quite the logical leap