Last week, we talked about CNN's list of America's best towns to visit. It was fun to hear about some cool spots in overlooked cities. But I'm not naive. Traveling can also be stressful. When you find a place to stay, you want to make sure it's safe, right? You expect that wherever you lay your head at night, you're going to have a basic level of privacy as you come and go. Well, imagine you book a place, you have a great time, only to learn afterwards that your most intimate moments were secretly recorded. Now imagine all that happened, but you never found out. My guest today is Isabelle Chapman. She's a reporter with CNN's Investigative Unit. She's going to tell us about her team's new reporting into Airbnb, which appears to have a problem with hidden cameras. From CNN, this is One Thing. I'm David Reind.

So, Isabelle, where does this investigation start?

So it starts several days before Christmas, and I was working on a story that I was planning to wrap up before the end of the year. I was doing my final checks and calling a bunch of people to sign off on some key facts in that story. One of the people I spoke with was an attorney. We had a short conversation about a fact in that story, and towards the end the call, I asked her whether there was anything else on her radar she felt was worth looking at. She mentioned that Airbnb has a hidden camera problem. I thought, That's interesting. I stay at Airbnbs frequently. I have for a long time. Same. I think everyone in my life does as well. I hadn't heard that much about hidden cameras at Airbnbs. I asked her whether there was a way to quantify that problem. She said yes. She said there were a number of cases out there about this and pointed me to a public deposition. I found in that deposition, an Airbnb employee speaking about the subject of hidden cameras.

Okay, so Airbnbs' hidden camera problems. So what did you guys find?

I've been working on this for many months with my colleagues, Miley DePueckamp and Audrey Asch, and we've interviewed more than 75 people. We've looked at thousands of pages of lawsuits and police records. Our conclusion has been that AirBnB purposely maintains little control or responsibility of what happens at the rental homes it profits from. The attorney I spoke to pointed me to a deposition in which an Airbnb representative spoke about Airbnb's hidden camera problem. This deposition made it clear that the company has known about this problem for at least a decade. The company has generated 35,000 customer support tickets about surveillance devices since December 2013.

Wow, 35,000.

35,000. Now, this number is a little murky. An The AirBnB spokesperson told CNN that a single report could create multiple tickets. The company declined to specify how many unique complaints there have been. And in the deposition, the AirBnB representative sought to downplay this number anyway. Away. They said, These instances could reflect a malfunctioning doorbell camera or a tablet with recording capabilities that had been left out. The representative, they didn't provide any numbers that would help us understand the seemingly innocuous claims among those 35,000 tickets.

But bottom line, it's still a lot of people who had at least some suspicion that they were being recorded.

Right. There have been many communications about surveillance devices between Airbnb and its customers since December 2013. Keep in mind, this is merely a glimpse into this problem. One, it doesn't illustrate what Airbnb likely knows about this issue. It also doesn't cover folks who stay at an Airbnb and then leave and never learn that they were secretly recorded. However, keep in mind, there are millions of bookings every year at Airbnb. Regardless, this is a fraction of those bookings. But I think if you speak with any of the victims in this story, the fact that this happened to them is horrific, and they live in this shadow of fear that their most private moments are going to end up on the internet.

Yeah, it sounds super scary. What did these victims say actually happened to them?

It varies. Some of them know for a fact that they were recorded having sex with their girlfriends, boyfriends, partners, husbands, wives. Some of them were recorded doing regular things, playing with their children. Some of them have been recorded undressing. One of the women we spoke to, her name is Chloe Le Brumet. She went to a music festival last year with her fiancé. They stayed at an Airbnb overnight and in the morning, rushed to to leave, grabbed a phone charger that they thought was theirs, and got home and had heard repeatedly from the host about the fact that they had taken this charger.

He became increasingly paranoid. When am I getting this charger back? I think it was a light bulb moment that we all just went, Oh, my goodness. Is this a hidden camera? It was just like, Holy crap. We all just froze and we're like, This This is a camera.

They looked a little more closely at the charger and realized it was a hidden camera. What happened when you realized that there was a camera in that charger?

It was mind-blowing. We could not believe it. There was so much shock surrounding it.

In our reporting for this story, we ordered a bunch of these. They cost anywhere from I would say, $50 to $75. They come in outlets, a key fob. There's one that we found that it looks like a hook on the door. They can be very difficult to spot.

These are just average everyday household items, but they have a tiny little camera in there that you wouldn't be able to see by first glance.

Exactly. Some of them are in alarm clocks, some of them are in smoke alarms. You can get them for less than $100 on the internet.

Wow. I mean, you mentioned that Airbnb has known about this problem for a decade now, but it's news to me. Why are we just finding out about this now?

One way that Airbnb keeps this issue quiet is they to tell people who complain into arbitration, which is a process that hides legal cases from public view. Another way that they do this is when they settle with people over hidden camera claims. To our knowledge, they require users to sign confidentiality agreements, which bar them from discussing the details of the deal. One man who we spoke with who was recorded having sex with his wife at an Airbnb rental, he received a financial settlement from the company. He spoke to us on the condition of anonymity. He was very nervous about his confidentiality settlement, but also the fact that these images may be out there on the internet. He didn't want to be identified.

I'm thinking about having your most private moments recorded, and you have to sign this agreement with this big company that says, You have to stay quiet about this. I mean, that's a pretty terrifying proposition.

Really terrifying. And so he spoke to us. How did you feel signing that confidentiality agreement? We didn't identify him visually, and we also changed his voice as a way to make sure he felt comfortable speaking about his experience.

They explained that there had been cameras set up throughout the entire house that we had stayed in, including in the restrooms, and that they had footage, intimate footage, of my wife and I. Every single room in the house had cameras.

Every room?

Yes, ma'am. The cameras were hidden in smoke sectors.

One of the things he told my colleague, Kyun La, during that interview was that he felt gagged. Do you believe that Airbnb has silenced you?

Yes. If people are out sharing their stories of how they were victimized through the services of Airbnb. Nobody's going to want to trust them.

One of the things that a Attorneys pointed out to us about Airbnb's legal strategies that was notable is their use of this decades-old law known as Section 230 of the communications decency act. It's this law that Facebook and Twitter or or X, use to say, We're not responsible for what people say on our platform. We are just a platform. We are just connecting people, and therefore, legally, we can't be held responsible for our users' rhetoric. One case comes to mind is a woman had an incident in a hot tub in Airbnb and became injured. Airbnb put forth a Section 230 defense saying that they weren't responsible for the fact that there wasn't proper hot tub information on the listing, and therefore this wasn't their responsibility.

We were just hosting the listing. Exactly. What the host does with that property and with the stuff on the property, that's their issue.

Exactly. Is this about controlling publicity? A hundred %. Absolutely. We spoke with this Florida-based attorney, Shannon Schott, who settled with Airbnb after her client said he found a hidden camera at an Airbnb rental. Airbnb wants to wash their hands clean when they have a host who does something illegal or suspicious. And she said that Airbnb's use of this law should be concerning to people who value their privacy and safety while staying at short-term rentals. She said, They're not arguing that this incident didn't happen, your client isn't injured. They're arguing, We aren't responsible for it.

Let me get this straight. If I'm staying at an Airbnb, the platform, Airbnb, is basically saying, You're staying at your own risk. We list these properties, and whatever the host decide to do with them is more or less up to them. That seems very different to me than a hotel, where if I went to a hotel and something, like a hot tub incident, or I found a hidden camera in that, I would expect management to really bend over backwards and say, Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry this happened. What can we do to fix it?

Right. I think if this happened to you at a hotel, you would expect them to call the police, which is not, as a matter of practice, something the Airbnb does. In fact, one of the things that they What we do that law enforcement experts we spoke with criticized is, and we learned this through the deposition, they may reach out to the accused party as part of their internal inquiry.

To the host.

To the host. We came across a couple of cases where Airbnb guests reported to Airbnb they'd found a hidden camera, and one of the initial questions was, Hey, do you mind if we contact the host and ask them for their side of the story? The law enforcement experts we spoke to said this is extremely problematic for them. It's essentially letting the suspect know- That an investigation is on the way. Exactly. It's notifying the suspect that this is going on.

Couldn't the host then just throw out the hidden camera, destroy the evidence?

Right. In theory, yes. The law enforcement experts we spoke to said that this is a policy that protects a defendant.

Wow. I mean, what does Airbnb have to say about all this?

So Airbnb declined an interview with us, but a spokesperson told CNN that hidden camera complaints are rare. When they do occur, and I'm going to quote directly, we take appropriate swift action, which can include removing hosts and listings that violate the policy. They also mentioned that, and I'm going to quote the spokesperson again, Airbnb's trust and safety policies lead the vacation rental industry and include background checks on US-based hosts and guests. Now, when we got this statement back, we went back to look at some of Airbnb's background check language on their website. I'm going to read some of the things that we learned about this policy, which is that AirBnB tells its users on its website that they should not rely on background checks to identify, and I'm quoting here, all past criminal convictions or sex offender registrations or other red flags. Then we We also learned that even if Airbnb discovers a user has a criminal background, convictions of, and I'm quoting again, murder, terrorism, rape, or child molestation, those aren't automatic qualifiers under the company's policy.

Wow. So somebody convicted of just horrible stuff, like you mentioned, could theoretically still host a property on the platform. That's right. But what about hidden cameras, specifically? What does the company's policy say about having these cameras lying around properties? Is How is that going to change?

Historically, Airbnb has allowed indoor cameras as long as they weren't in bedrooms and bathrooms, as long as the host disclosed the presence of those cameras to guests. In January, we began reaching out to former Airbnb employees to ask them about hidden camera concerns within the company, within the industry. Bland. Generic. Downright uninviting. If these are the vibes you're going for, then we're your girls. Because we're the nation's number one interior designers for Airbnbs. In early March, Saturday Night Live actually had a skit where they mocked Airbnbs' hidden camera problem. Why stay in a hotel when for basically the same amount of money, you could stay in a place with worse sheets and a camera in the toilet? And I believe it was just over a week later, they said, We're actually going to do away with this policy. We will be banning all indoor cameras as of April 30th. However, in announcing this policy, Airbnb said nothing of how it would force hosts to comply with these rules. Most, if not all, of the cases that we looked at were hidden cameras in bedrooms and bathrooms that were in violation of Airbnb's original policy anyway.

It seems like it's on the honor system at this point.

Exactly. Exactly.

I mean, I guess after all this, Isabelle, should I be staying at AirBnB? That seems like the obvious question here, even if you say it's a small amount of the total bookings that AirBnB sees.

I think that's a good question to be asking. We spoke with a number of former AirBnB employees who worked in... They fielded concerns about trust, safety, privacy, that thing during their time at the company, and they said that they wouldn't stay at an AirBnB out of concerns for safety based on some of the things that they had seen. Are you still angry?

I would say I'm angry, I'm disappointed. It's so eerie and so creepy that those things stay with you. Then your brain starts thinking, What did they see? What happened while we were in that room?

Speaking with some of the victims who had been recorded without their consent while staying at an Airbnb, it's very clear that they have suffered long-term trauma due to their host's actions.

By not doing their due diligence, by not vetting the people properly, they're harming families. They're harming people. And they're selfishly making a lot of money while doing that.

There's a pretty crippling fear that these images going to end up on the Internet, and it's very difficult to spot one of these cameras.

That video is the most intimate part of our lives, of anybody's life. So to be uninvited into something that's so private, it's devastating. It's a travesty.

Wow. Yeah, it's great reporting, Isabel. Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producer is Fez Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the Executive Creative producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lanie Steinhart, James André, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Matt Le, Patricia DiCarlo, John General, and Katie Hinman. Thanks, as always, for listening. If you like the show, leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. It really does help get the word out about the show. We'll be back on Sunday with another episode. Talk to you then.