Airbnb wins Vancouver privacy statement as court overturns host data release order

Vancouver housing activist Rohana Rezel has owned a bovine Airbnb and the city of Vancouver for years, and a BC Supreme Court ruling this week means there is no end in sight.

Rezel had filed freedom of information requests with the city in 2019, seeking information about short-term rental landlords. But the city and company resisted, saying it could harm property owners and leave them susceptible to violence and even stalking.

British Columbia’s Information and Privacy Commissioner partially agreed, but ordered the city to release information to Rezel, including “license numbers of individuals on the Airbnb platform, home addresses of all hosts in the city; and the license numbers associated with those addresses.”

Airbnb objected to the city’s release of the information and sought a judicial review in the BC Supreme Court last year.

This week, Judge Jasvinder Basran sided with the company and ordered the privacy commissioner to reconsider his decision and notify hosts whose information is at stake.

for Rezel, Airbnb hosts in Vancouver are “a select group of people to run a business in such secrecy.”

He said he wanted to find information on short-term rentals because people should be able to know if they’ve been evicted to make way for a Airbnband they should know if they live next door.

“I have helped many people who were evicted from their homes to make room for Airbnb and often people don’t even know that the reason they got evicted is because of AirbnbRezel said in an interview on Thursday.

“People suspect that, but they have no way of knowing for sure and they would come to me and (must) use indirect means to find out.”

Rezel said the City of Vancouver’s reluctance to release information about landlords and their short-term rentals makes it difficult to prove a wrongful eviction.

“Now imagine if this data was publicly available,” he said. “If you then get an eviction notice, three months later you can look this up and you see well, they evicted me, but then they applied for a permit.”

Airbnb won his case this week to reconsider Rezel’s request, but the activist was not involved in the case and identified only as a “John Doe Requester.”

He said the company had claimed costs related to the judicial review, which he would not have been able to cover if he had participated.

An affidavit submitted to the privacy commissioner by the city had described social media posts that were “obscene, aggressive and threatening” towards short-term rental operators, demonstrating the potential harm of releasing the information.

According to the judge’s decision, the privacy commissioner has since erroneously classified home addresses as business information rather than personal information Airbnb hosts run home businesses in their main residence.

The privacy commissioner’s finding that license numbers “are personal information, but primary residence addresses are not, is confusing,” Basran wrote.

“The latter has a much closer connection to the personal lives and details of the hosts. (License for short term) numbers, primary residence addresses of landlords and the recognized ability of anyone to find the names of individual landlords, in itself constitute disclosure of a wide variety of personal information,” the ruling read. “Additionally, it would allow the discovery of a wealth of personal information.”

Rezel said he was disappointed by the ruling, meaning he will have to wait even longer to see if he can access information about short-term rentals in Vancouver in the midst of a housing crisis.

“I’m a firm believer that you can’t have one group of compliant companies and then another group of companies that can operate in secrecy,” he said. “It’s almost like it’s a two-tiered system.”

Airbnb did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the court’s ruling.