The rapid change in how we vacation has been brought about by businesses like Airbnb, but there may also be a negative aspect.
In recent years, a number of reports of tourists discovering covert cameras in vacation rentals have prompted concerns about the security of staying in a stranger’s house.
Kennedy Calwell expressed her shock on Tiktok in April 2023 after learning that the Airbnb she and her pals were rented had a hidden camera.
When their “paranoid” friend claimed she had a sensation there were cameras monitoring them, she and 14 other people were staying in Vancouver, Canada, to celebrate a 30th birthday.
They continued to search “every single showerhead, all the picture frames, doorknobs, and everywhere in the house for a camera” until discovering one concealed behind an odd plug that was too small to accommodate any gadget. The party quickly learned there was a little camera in the wall socket that “faced directly to the shower.”
Meanwhile, in February of last year, Texas resident Brittany Walsh shared a TikTok video of a ping-pong ball-sized camera she had discovered plugged into the wall in the bathroom of her Austin rental home.
She depicted the arrival of neighbourhood police to document the incident on her film, which is against the law in Texas.
“Someone’s boutta catch a felony for invasive visual recording,” Ms. Walsh captioned the video, which has received over 548,000 views.
In 2017, Jason Scott shared a photo of a motion detector with a camera placed inside that his coworker, who must remain nameless, had found in an Airbnb flat.
He tweeted: “(He departed at 3am, reported, host is suspended, colleague got refund.) In ‘oh, that’s a thing now’ news, a colleague of mine thought it unusual that there was a single’motion detector’ in his Airbnb in the bedroom and voila, it’s an IP camera linked to the web.
Should everyone now check their vacation rentals for cameras? If so, how exactly?
“You have to be vigilant to the likelihood of possibility,” Keith Roberts, a technician with Advanced Sweeping, a service that finds bugs for people and corporations, told The Independent. “The world contains some bad people.”
He claims that during the past few years, Advanced Sweeping has discovered more concealed cameras.
These days, cameras and listening devices are much more common. There used to be a small, exclusive market, and you needed a connection to access it. Anyone can now purchase them off the shelf from Amazon or eBay, making it much simpler.
There are various things a layperson can do to check for cameras, however Roberts advises having a professional business in to check if you want to be absolutely certain you aren’t being filmed.
Take a look around.
“With cameras, you should look for tiny holes, which is where the lens will be,” advises Roberts. “Verify ordinary objects, like the backs of books, mirrors, lightbulbs, and houseplants. Look in the obvious places; if someone needed information, they would have left a device in the living room. A camera would probably be placed in the places used for grooming, such as the bathroom, shower and bedroom, if the individual was a voyeur.
Source: independent