The rise of home rental services such as Airbnb has been swift in changing the way we holiday – but there’s a potential dark side too.
Several stories about holidaymakers finding hidden cameras in rental properties have raised questions about the safety of staying in a stranger’s home in recent years.
In February, Brittany Walsh from Texas posted a TikTok video of a ping-pong-ball sized camera she’d found plugged into the wall in her Austin rental apartment’s bathroom.
In her video, she showed local police arriving to record the incident, which is a crime under Texas law.
“Someone’s boutta catch a felony for invasive visual recording,” Ms Walsh captioned her video, which has had over 548,000 views.
Meanwhile, in 2017, Jason Scott tweeted a picture of a camera hidden inside a motion detector that his unnamed colleague discovered in an Airbnb apartment.
“In ‘oh, that’s a thing now’ news, a colleague of mine thought it odd that there was a single ‘motion detector’ in his Airbnb in the bedroom and voila, it’s an IP camera connected to the web,” he tweeted, adding: “(He left at 3am, reported, host is suspended, colleague got refund.)”
The issue came to light again after a British TikTok user, describing himself as an “ex-hacker”, shared his tips for spotting hidden cameras in Airbnbs in a video that quickly went viral.
In a clip viewed more than five million times, Marcus Hutchins, who teaches cybersecurity, recommends shining a torch around the room when you arrive to look for any potential recording devices and paying attention to obvious places a camera might be positioned.
“Take this fire alarm for instance, it is placed right above the bed,” he says.
“Now one way to see if the device is a camera is to shine a bright light at it. If you hit a camera lens it’s going to get a blue-ish reflection. You can test this by shining a light at your phone and seeing how the camera looks when placed under a flashlight.”
So should we all be checking for cameras in our holiday rentals now? And, if so, how?
“You have to be vigilant to the likelihood of possibility,” Keith Roberts, a technician for Advanced Sweeping, a company that detects bugs for individuals and businesses, tells The Independent. “There are some bad people in the world.”
He says the number of hidden cameras that Advanced Sweeping finds has increased over the last few years.
“Cameras and eavesdropping devices are much more prevalent these days. There used…
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