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Comment by wtracy | Hacker News Reader

I really wish this page did a better job explaining why "landlord tech" is problematic. It doesn't really go deeper than mentioning erosion of privacy (without concretely explaining how that happens) and making vague statements about racial inequity and evictions.

As it is now, it reads like an appeal to the general resentment of "big tech" and of landlords ("if it makes their jobs more efficient, it must be bad!") than an actual exploration of the problem.

I don't doubt that the articles linked at the end describe some horrifying real problems, but making the audience sift through a list of links is not an effective way of motivating people.

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Agreed. The site leads with (interspersing my reaction):

> Is your building management moving online?

I'm more against apartments that don't use such tech; they make payment, maintenance requests, and communication a lot easier.

>Have new cameras been installed in your home or neighborhood? Has access to your building changed? For instance, you no longer have a standard key?

Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place.

>Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?

See first point. Although I note (from two difference places since moving to Austin) many to have moved screening over to "get a $100k liability insurance policy and you're good" (~$100-200/year).

With that said, given how FB et al have their tentacles in everything, now I am worried about how much privacy they bleed when I use such resident portals.

Security cameras and electronic locks are great, for the most part. The latter allows auditing of who accessed my place

I would like to audit the landlord's daughter. Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business. There was a time when surveillance went overboard so much that they wrote restrictions on it into the Constitution, but unfortunately the Constitution puts restraints only on the government. You'd like to see them put onto private parties as well. And then there's information leaking. Jeff Bezos owns the nation's doorbell cameras, he knows who lives where and shares the information freely with the cops that no one trusts, all without a warrent.

Is your landlord using new payment, notification, or screening systems?

Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.

>Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business.

Yes, I agree they shouldn't be doing it arbitrarily. I mean that e.g. when I suspected unauthorized access (which happened).

> Seriously, who or what I'm bringing home is no one's business.

sure, if you're renting an entire building. less so if you're sharing a building with other tenants.

> Having rented from bankruptcy artists more than once I'd really really appreciate a credit history of the landlord. A repair history of the building would be nice to have, too. Can't move into a place where the roof needs fixing but the owner is too overextended to fix it.

I bet you could get some of this if you offered to pay above market rent or if you show interest in a unit that's been listed for a while.

The landlord controls the camera and the access data, not the tenant, the probability that it will be used to help the tenant is way lower than the probability it will be used against the tenant.

I'm worried that the surveillance footage will be used to prove tenets commited a litany of frivolous tiny "violations", available to the landlord on a less than a whim, only a click, while if footage were to prove my innocence on a matter, they'll do everything in their power to delay...

Yah it came across to me as pretty one sided. I'd love to hear a balanced take on the subject and hear both sides of the story. Hotels abandoned traditional keys long ago. I don't get why security cameras are such a menace too. They don't prevent crimes but I'd sure love to know they were around if ever I was assaulted and they increased the odds of landing a conviction to get that criminal off the streets.

In most cases the tech is used as cover for eroding already minimal tenant rights and services. For example, one building I lived in switched to digital locks and the price for a lost key replacement went from $10 to $50. And according to them the digital key replacement process was much more efficient.

That could be due to several possible legitimate reasons in addition to the obvious. The key fee may have been set 20 years ago when 10 dollars was reasonable and not updated to cover labor and the deterrent effect for losing keys. When updating the new system, the cost could have been adjusted to keep up with the times. The new system could be genuinely more expensive to buy keys for (assuming like RFID) or require a more technical user to perform the update. Unlike metal keys that can be pre-cut often manual intervention is required to replace a dead key since there is a database association with the key that needs to be established. $50 is enough to be a deterrent and not enough to be considered excessive considering that replacing a car key can run over $200 for the fob alone depending on make and model.

I recently reverse-engineered the keyfob for my building because the official one is big, ugly and expensive to replace (after I've already paid fees to replace 2 lost ones).

The result was that 1) the system is absolutely insecure and can be cloned very easily and 2) all the hardware I needed to reverse-engineer & copy it (including several new key fobs) cost me the same amount as a single official replacement.

I don't think the building owners are setting the price either, it's the vendor of the "security" system that is reselling cheap insecure crap at 20x the real price and exploiting information asymmetry to sell them.

At least with low-tech solutions like old-style keys everyone is on a level-playing field and selling them for 20x the price wouldn't fly (because it is common knowledge that a locksmith can make you a copy for the price of 2 cups of coffee), but this kind of new tech allows them to get away with it, and this trend will only get worse as "landlord tech" advances.

Regarding car keys, the astronomic price you mention is also price gouging just because they can. The actual hardware is not expensive at all, it's just that they (officially) need to be programmed by the dealership and that allows them to set any price they want. Of course, there is software and tools out there (if you look in the right place) that will completely defeat the apparent "security" provided by such system so you're not even gaining anything regarding security.

I knew a facilities director who found out when people changed staff at one of the facilities he managed they wound up getting swindled by this crazy contract the locksmiths had the organization signed up with. The problem was keys were being copied and proliferated and accountability of who accessed which rooms and buildings in the complex was no longer manageable. The solved that problem but took an a host of other costs with key replacements and who owned the master key set. From what I remember the locksmith company owned the masters and charged a crazy amount for key copies. I forget the details exactly but I remember the sentiment of the director being that the contract was heavily biased in favor of the locksmith company.

Well I didn’t sign my original lease for that building 20 years before the switch so if the traditional re-keying process had become more expensive I assume they would have simply updated their lease terms.

Your list of vaguely plausible what-if scenarios is exactly what I’m talking about. Neither of us has any idea what the true costs are, but for some reason the tech makes us more open to accepting what is at the end of the day an erosion of tenant rights and services.

"given my experience with facebook, twitter and google, big tech is likely to make my renting experience worse"

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