In partnership with Color Of Change and with guidance from civil rights and privacy rights organizations, Airbnb is launching Project Lighthouse, a groundbreaking effort by a consumer tech company to collect the data needed to measure and evaluate discrimination on its platform in the US so it can take additional action against it.

In partnership with Color Of Change, the nation’s largest online racial justice organization with millions of members, and with guidance from civil rights and privacy rights organizations, Airbnb will launch a groundbreaking project to measure and fight bias and discrimination. The findings will inform the creation and updates of tools and policies to help combat racial discrimination and bias that Black users and other people of color have faced when using Airbnb. The data collected in the United States for Project Lighthouse will be handled in a way that protects people’s privacy and be used exclusively for anti-discrimination work.

This project will measure discrimination based on perception, using a privacy-centric methodology that determines the race someone might associate with a first name and profile photo. These perceptions will be aggregated and used to identify and measure discrepancies in people’s experiences on the platform that could be a result of discrimination and bias. Data privacy advocates and experts have provided guidance to help ensure this data is not associated with an individual’s Airbnb account. The methodology is publicly available in a technical paper for other companies who want to detect and remediate bias and discrimination on their platforms.

“We have made significant progress in the last few years to address painful stories of individuals who had requests to book a listing rejected and other negative experiences because of their race. Our purpose is to create belonging, and even one incident is an affront to our values. We have a responsibility to do more. We are honored to partner with Color Of Change to help us take this work to the next level, to help us understand fully when discrimination occurs, how unconscious bias is manifested on the platform, and the effectiveness of our policies. You cannot fix bias without measuring it first,” said Brian Chesky, Airbnb Co-Founder and CEO. “In addition to our ongoing diversity and anti-discrimination efforts, as we grapple with the effects of COVID-19, now more than ever we need to be a platform for economic empowerment that can help hosts, including Black residents, keep their homes and avoid displacement from their communities.”

The findings will be used to examine and address disparities in how Black users and other people of color experience Airbnb, out of fear of mistreatment or due to discrimination and bias. Areas include, for example:

• The reservation process, through search, request, acceptance and cancellation;
• Reviews from their hosts and guests; and
• Contact with Airbnb customer support and other lines of support.

This project has been in development for nearly two years with support and input from Asian Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, Center for Democracy & Technology, Color Of Change, League of United Latin American Citizens – LULAC, National Action Network, The Leadership Conference, and Upturn.