Chapter 1: The Art of the Jawn
The flight from Montreal wasn’t long. And after spending three months under dreary gray skies and freezing temperatures, eating food that paled in comparison to my time in London, I was more than ready to be back in the USA. Most importantly, I had accomplished what I’d set out to do. After 15 years, I had grown weary of the tech industry's questionable politics and changeable objectives. So, I did what many dream of: I left. I walked away from a high-paying career to bet on myself.
I was 43 when I left tech, sold my furniture, and temporarily relocated to a foreign land where I could finally put words on paper and bring my debut novel to life. The plan worked. I spent most days at the British Library in the social sciences wing, where, like many other aspiring authors, I could free my mind to create a new universe in 77,000 words. By the time I left the UK in early January, I was more than halfway done. Largely stuck indoors during the winter months in Montreal, save for my mile-long jaunts to the gym a few times a week, I made good use of the time I had by finishing the rest of my manuscript. I was deeply proud of my accomplishment.
Now back in the US, the only steps left were to edit the novel and complete queries for a carefully curated list of prospective agents. While I wasn’t thrilled about the location of my Airbnb—within walking distance of Center City but further north of where I felt most comfortable—I was hopeful that it would at least be comfortable based on the comfy-looking couch, large bed, and good-sized wooden desk in the photos. The listing also featured hundreds of positive reviews, along with the host’s ‘Supehost’ badge, a designation reserved for top hosts. I was confident that I would be back in NYC, my home for nearly a decade, before the 4th of July.
When my Uber pulled up at 1620 Mount Vernon Street, I was relieved to see that the red-bricked rowhouse matched the photos on Airbnb. After the driver helped me with my two large black suitcases, I slogged my way up the short flight of stairs to the front door. As I checked my phone for the keypad code, I noticed a Ring doorbell in, but did’t think much of it. After entering, I saw a second set of double wooden doors with clear glass panes. I could see the door to my listing straight ahead just one flight of stairs up. When I reached the small landing, I entered the door code and tentatively looked inside. I was greeted by a new-looking kitchen complete with cherry wood cabinets and silver appliances. There was also a large table off to the left. A stark white refrigerator, out of place with the rest of the decor, stood to the right of the entry door. Four large bay windows looked out directly at the cream colored back of the rowhouse next door. One window, the one closest to the bedroom, offered an aesthetically chaotic view of a parking lot, several add-on wooden decks, and half a dozen multifamily homes with entrances facing away from Green Street.
As I entered the bedroom, everything appeared just as it had in the photos on the site. Relief swept over me. A closer look revealed that the nightstands, dresser, and end tables were all dusty, as if they hadn’t been used or cleaned in quite some time. Given that the rest of the room and the bathroom all checked out, I decided not to mention it to the host and just wipe them down myself. Later that day, after a trip to the local grocery store, I finally got around to taking a look inside the microwave. It was filthy. There was no way it had been cleaned. A stickler for cleanliness and a lifelong germaphobe, this new and unpleasant discovery rattled me, but I decided to let it go and clean it properly myself the following day.
A week later, after I’d gotten my bearings in the neighborhood and enrolled in a local gym, I decided to do some laundry. Might as well wash the sheets, too. But when I pulled back the fitted sheet, I discovered that the mattress protector had several large yellow stains. The kind that accumulate after months of repeatedly being covered in sweat and body oil. I mentally recoiled at the realization that I’d spent a week sleeping atop something so disgusting. Begrudgingly, I returned to the store to purchase liquid bleach, the only thing I knew for certain would remove the stains. But yet again, for reasons even I’m not entirely sure of, I ultimately decided not to mention it to the host.
Days turned into weeks. I never saw or spoke directly to Alecsander, the Host, who, from what I could gather, seemed to live below me in the unit marked ‘1’. But occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of his silhouette on the other side of my frosted pane door, going to or from the laundry room, or catch the back of his head watering plants in the back garden through one of the kitchen windows. Most days, the brownstone, which housed four other Airbnb rentals, felt a lot like a college dorm, with a revolving door of graduate students and interns coming and going.
I don’t remember the exact day that someone moved in above me, but it soon became clear that they would be around for a while. Every morning and evening at about the same time, I was greeted by a ‘thump’, ‘thump’, ‘thump’ as a heavy tread reverberated off my ceiling, often waking me up before I was ready. Sometimes, I could hear what sounded like a large chest or piece of luggage being slowly dragged across the floor. That noise was the worst. At one point, I actually went upstairs and knocked on her door to let her know that she was making too much noise. An Asian girl who appeared to be in her mid-twenties peeked out from behind the door, her hair in a messy bun. I blamed thin walls, likely true, and the lack of carpeting. She apologized and agreed to be more cognizant of her tread. And she was…for a while.
One afternoon, while I was doing laundry, I noticed something odd. There, in the upper left-hand corner of the small laundry closet, was a CCTV camera. Why would someone put a camera in a laundry room? I looked to my right. There was a small, partially open closet. Inside were several shelves of sheets, somewhat neatly folded. I guess they have a problem with people stealing sheets, I rationalized. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. There was also a camera right above the door to my unit, initially obscured by an emergency LED light. What the hell? And another across the hall at the top of the landing, right above unit ‘3’. I walked back down to my unit, stepped across the threshold, and looked back at the white door half a landing above me. Wait a minute…that camera can see inside my kitchen every time I open my door.
The next day, I went all the way to the top of the staircase, passing units ‘4’ and ‘5’ along the way. Above each door was a CCTV camera. Okay, there’s no way there should be this many cameras. Why would anyone need to see who’s coming and going out of each room when each door has its own passcode, and there’s a Ring doorbell right outside the front door of the house? What the hell are all these cameras for?
Then, one day, while heading out to the gym, I noticed a CCTV camera in the upper left-hand corner of the entry hallway, just above the mahogany crown molding above the second set of double doors. When I returned, I noticed another across the hall from it, pointed towards the front doors. Shit! Like most people, I’d heard the horror stories about Airbnb guests finding hidden cameras in their rooms. Above beds. In the shower. Hidden in lamps. Would someone who has six CCTV cameras inside their rental home really stop short of hidden cameras? I didn’t want to wait to find out. I searched ‘How to check for hidden cameras’. I turned off the lights in my room to see if I could spot any flashes of light reflecting back to me. I even called the local police. ‘This is Philly,’ the woman on the switchboard replied. ‘We don’t have that sort of thing.’ And then, I remembered something vague, slowly coming to the surface of my mind. Hadn’t I heard something about indoor cameras being banned by Airbnb?
There it was in black and white, courtesy of the algorithm: ‘Airbnb banned all indoor security cameras on April 30, 2024. This policy change meant hosts could no longer have indoor cameras, regardless of location or whether they were disclosed, to prioritize guest privacy.’
My eyes widened. My heart started to race. The host is in violation of Airbnb’s policy! Shit! Was I being watched every time I took a shower, sat on the toilet, or watched TV? I decided to investigate each and every possible device in my room. The smart TV and smoke detector being the prime suspects. I’d heard that smart TVs could spy on people using built-in cameras. What exactly is that small, red glowing light I see at the bottom of the TV when I turn it off? More Googling. Turns out it was just the standby function. But just to make sure, I decided to cover it with a small box, just tall enough to block the light.
The smoke detector proved more difficult, as there were many similar spyware makes and models online, all of which could plausibly pass for the real thing. The only way to be sure was to open it up. An AA battery stared back at me. I took a photo of the device and instructed Google to tell me the make and model. No hits came back for spy devices. I checked the heating and cooling vents on either side of the large-screen smart TV. Then I checked both lamps. Nothing. I moved into the bathroom. Fortunately, everything seemed sufficiently dated; nothing hinted at a recording device, though a fan was located directly above the toilet. I squinted through the vent slits to see if anything shiny or camera-like was staring back at me. Nothing. Despite not finding anything, I couldn’t shake my paranoia.
Okay, now what? Do I contact Airbnb? Then I’d have to leave. And go where? Center city isn’t exactly teaming with temporary housing options. It’s May. I’ll be competing with tourists and graduate students alike for the few remaining summer rentals. If I contact Airbnb, they’re either gonna move me to someplace more expensive, more dangerous, maybe both.
None of the available options seemed like a good choice, but something had to be done. At least there’d be consequences for the host once Airbnb found out that he’d been recording people. But before reaching out to Airbnb, I decided to do some more digging. I’d seen the Trustpilot reviews for the company, and they did not seem promising, especially when it came to guest support. That’s when I learned about the ‘black box’ team.
In 2021, Bloomberg published an article titled "Airbnb Is Spending Millions of Dollars to Make Nightmares Go Away." Several other news sites quickly picked up the article and put their own spin on it. But the key takeaway remained the same: the company was actively throwing money at problematic situations in order to keep them from becoming front-page news, be it illegal cameras, sexual assault, or even murder. Internally dubbed the ‘black box’, the team tasked with managing such crises consisted of around 100 agents worldwide. Many of whom hailed from the emergency services, the military, and even high-level government intelligence organizations like the CIA.
Shocked, I double-checked the listing for my reservation. How could there be so many cameras and yet not even one Airbnb employee seemed to know? The policy had been in place for over a year. Surely someone at the company must have noticed. On the site, everything looked normal, just as it had when I’d booked the rental.
But then I looked more closely. I read every word. Clicked every link. Scrutinized each photo. I stopped when I came to a picture of the building’s foyer from the first-floor hallway. I squinted, even though I had my glasses on. There, in the upper right-hand corner, was a small, oblong device hovering by the crown molding. Its dark, unflinching eye seemed to penetrate the photo. Slowly, I zoomed in, pulling my fingers further and further apart on the trackpad. Oh, my god! It’s the CCTV camera!
Frantic, I clicked on the ‘Amenities’ link. Normal. Normal. Exterior security cameras. Wait! What? There in light-colored print so small it couldn’t be larger than a size-8 font, was the sentence “Security cameras are located near the outside entrance and in the interior communal hallways.” I couldn’t believe it. There, staring me in the face, was a written description of indoor cameras in the listing. The photo was easy to miss, the text significantly less so. Why hasn’t anyone from Airbnb noticed this? It’s been 15 months since the policy went into effect? How could that much time pass without anyone flagging such a clear violation? Home safety, eh? The irony was so glaring it was almost comical.
Out of curiosity, I checked the guest reviews. Maybe a guest had noticed one of the cameras and left a comment. There were six after all. Nothing in April, March, or February. Damn, do I really have to go through every review since Spring 2024? I was just about to call it quits for the day when I came across a January 2025 review written by someone named Joshua. ‘Responsive host’. ‘Fast wi-fi’. ‘Area seems safe with a decent amount of foot traffic (and there are security cameras at the front hallway).’
According to Airbnb’s own website, each guest (and host) review goes through AI moderation. A phrase like ‘indoor cameras’ should have triggered an automatic red flag, prompting a human review. But clearly, that hadn’t happened. Altogether, the company had not one, not two, but three pieces of evidence that all clearly showed that the host was in violation of its own privacy policy, yet it ignored all three for well over a year. How many people had been recorded in that time? Based on the number of reviews, the number was likely close to 40.
The discovery left a bitter taste. If the company didn’t care enough about its guests' rights to even enforce its own policy, it was unlikely to side with me for pointing out its negligence. The menacing ‘black box’ team might even get involved.
Convinced that telling Airbnb about the indoor cameras was unlikely to lead to a favorable outcome, I decided to look for alternative housing on my own. Maybe this will turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Maybe I’ll be able to move back to NYC sooner than I had planned. On May 2, I emailed a woman named Elvira. Her ‘Light-filled 1-bedroom’ in uptown Manhattan looked promising. I even messaged my Airbnb host to see if I could leave a month early without paying June’s rent. He agreed. A few days passed with no response—an eternity in the NYC housing market. When Friday came and went, and I still hadn’t received a response, I knew that the apartment had been taken. I had no other leads. I was trapped.
On May 19th, I made my final payment to Airbnb. But knowing I was recorded every time I left the apartment, and that my image might be used in unseemly ways, was deeply unsettling. I’d been to the dark web. I knew what people could do with a single video image. There are entire sites dedicated to open CCTV camera feeds that watch unsuspecting people. One time, I saw a camera in a daycare center. Unnerving.
I contemplated covering up my face, but suspected that doing so would set off alarm bells for whoever was watching. Who knew what would happen if the host figured out I knew before I could tell anyone? This is Philly, after all. So I did the only thing I could: I kept digging for information. I needed something. Anything. So long as it got me out of the house with the creepy Big Brother vibes.
Interestingly, that very same day, while taking another pass at the Airbnb listing photos, I suddenly realized that the picture of my door had been strategically cropped so that the CCTV camera above it was no longer visible. It was taken at an odd angle, one that could easily cause someone to fall backward down the stairs. It would have made much more sense to take the photo from the small half-landing across from the laundry closet, where there would be no risk of injury. But that angle would have made the camera unmistakable.
Little did I know that in less than 72 hours, I would discover something so shocking that it would send me down a rabbit hole of bureaucracy and deceit so deep and twisted that it would take six months, four major holidays, and a 75-page evidence exhibit for me to crawl out of it.