Most of the publicity regarding cameras hidden in the rooms of paying guests has centered on Airbnb, but conventional hotels have also engaged in spying, as in a recent scandal in South Korea where some hotel staff peddled captured video footage of guests online as pornography. With cameras getting smaller while retaining good lens quality, and storage capacity on digital solid state chips growing larger, for ordinary people the temptation to spy has never been greater. No longer does someone need thousands of dollars and considerable technical knowledge to set up and conceal a surveillance camera or two or three.
Airbnb claims it does not allow cameras, hidden or otherwise, in bathrooms and bedrooms, and that it requires hosts to disclose to guests the locations of any cameras in the more public spaces of rental properties. They allow cameras in spaces such as living rooms and kitchens in the interest of monitoring and protecting the hosts’ property. Airbnb says it’s all there in the rental agreement a guest signs. Hotels have always operated without surveillance cameras officially and knowingly installed in guest rooms. Following the reasoning from Airbnb, their situation is different because the rentals are in privately owned dwellings, where damage and abuse caused by guests can more seriously impact business for each host, who can’t spread out losses over the income from a hundred room hotel.
16 GB (GigaBytes) of data storage and wi-fi capability, packed onto a card the size of a person’s thumbnail. There are now cards with 512 GB capacity, which can store several day’s worth of high definition video. Photo by Hegro Berlin.
That’s a good economic point, but not a good moral one. No spying on people in a domestic situation is acceptable. When people are out in actual public spaces, as opposed to the relatively public spaces of a domestic living room, kitchen, or hotel room, they should nonetheless be entitled to complete privacy. Having guests waive their right to privacy by signing off on yet another head spinning legal disclosure, like the multitude of such documents they encounter now, is not acceptable. The choice then becomes either accept spying or do not rent rooms from Airbnb. That could be acceptable as long as Airbnb hosts explicitly and clearly disclose the locations of every camera and show to the guest what the camera is seeing in real time. After the guest’s stay concludes and the host has had the opportunity to assess the property for damages, arrangements can be made between the guest, the host, and Airbnb to destroy the video footage to the satisfaction of all.
Airbnb has undertaken a new business model filling a niche and has apparently been successful with it, but if it cannot ensure guest privacy while also preserving the integrity of host property, the company will see a loss of public trust, and with it a loss of revenue. The latest news stories about spying hosts can’t be good for business. Left unattended, the problem for Airbnb will only get worse.
In the 1960 film Psycho, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, owner of the Bates Motel, spies the old-fashioned, low tech way on guest Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh. If by peeping at his guest, Marion, with the same supposed motivation as some Airbnb hosts, Norman was trying to catch her stealing, he was far too late for that. It did not end well for Marion Crane, Norman Bates, or the Bates Motel.
Technological improvements will continue to make cameras smaller and more capable of capturing high quality images in low light; digital storage capacity will continue to increase and be put on ever smaller devices, along with the increasing capacity of wi-fi networks to handle the flow of information; batteries will get smaller and more powerful, allowing tiny cameras to operate without wires, which will make them even easier to hide. All these technological improvements, as always, are amoral in themselves. The question becomes, for people who desire extra income by renting out rooms in their homes, as for all of us, does what technology makes possible mean that we have to use it, even if the technology trespasses on moral boundaries? Just because you can do something, does that mean you should do it?
— Techly
At a time when cable television shows are promoting cooking, and cooking in superbly designed and equipped kitchens, like never before, Americans are cooking at home less than ever before. In this sense of cooking, throwing a prepared meal from the supermarket into the microwave, oven, or a frying pan does not qualify. Cooking means readying and blending raw or minimally prepared ingredients in such a way as to constitute a full meal. Cooking in this sense refers to how many households prepared dinner, if not breakfast or lunch, forty or fifty years ago.
For dinner at least, the American home cook of 1960 or 1970 visited the grocery store to pick up ingredients in the produce department, usually the meat section, and perhaps the middle aisles for flour, sugar, spices, and canned goods. The home cook of that time rarely picked up things from the frozen food section, and then only basic ingredients like frozen vegetables instead of any of the frozen meals, of which the selection would have been limited anyway. At that time there were only a few cooking shows on television, and those, such as Julia Child’s show, were buried on public television where relatively few people saw them. Home improvement shows with their enormous kitchen remodels hadn’t even shown up yet, and wouldn’t do so in anything like their current form until the 1990s.
African woman frying bean cakes at a roadside. Photo by IKoye.
In the years since the 1960s and 1970s, home cooking has dropped off considerably, and at the same time interest has risen in TV cooking shows and home improvement shows that feature enormous, professionally equipped kitchen remodels. It’s comical to watch on television these upper middle class couples with too much money tour homes that have kitchens large enough for the staff of a small restaurant, and which statistics about current trends and your own instincts as a viewer tell you the couple will never need nor use to its full capability, and to see them ooh and aah over it as if it’s perfect for them. These shows seem to be more about fantasy wish fulfillment than realistic expectations, and the same dynamic appears to operate for the cooking shows which have taken over cable television.
At a time when over one billion of the world’s population goes hungry, Americans are enthralled by television shows which detail how to prepare rich and intricate dishes, often with elements of stressful drama added for no reason other than to intensify viewer engagement in an otherwise prosaic process. This is perverse. Few of the viewers will actually attempt to make the dishes themselves, but that is besides the point. It is like the expensive and needlessly over-equipped kitchens on view on the home improvement programs. It is a sort of pornography. Those in the lower classes might wish they could make those fancy dishes in those elaborate kitchens. Those in the middle classes might ponder that with a home equity loan the kitchen would be possible for them, and then what times they would have in it, cooking and entertaining!
Julia Child, the original television cook, demonstrating on her public television show The French Chef that perfection is not always possible, and that’s alright.
The upper classes, of course, find all of this unnecessary, because they have, as they have always had, people to do all of this for them. As long as they can come down to the kitchen at midnight and find the makings for a sandwich on their own, they should be okay with any kitchen, however elaborate. The real target of these television programs, both the debt-inducing kitchen remodels and the guilt-inducing cooking shows, is the middle class, and especially those already in the upper middle class or aspiring to make it to those heights. What’s the point? Spend money, even money you don’t have, to become part of the People Living the Good Life. Eat well, even if you have to pretend to know how to do that. There’s no need for all these cooking shows. A few would suffice. Instruction in cooking for a good life doesn’t need hours upon hours of elaboration and drama; cooking to impress others with your station in life apparently requires whole cable television channels.
― Izzy
