Some guests and hosts say Airbnb permanently banned them after background checks by third-party company Inflection revealed minor offenses or old misdemeanors (Maxwell Strachan/VICE)

Maxwell Strachan / VICE:
As gambling becomes legitimized across the US, a look at the rise of gambling on smartphones, leading some to financial catastrophe and addiction  —  Financial catastrophe is now only a few clicks away, a problem that is showing quiet signs of becoming a crisis.  “I can’t just get rid of my phone,” one problem gambler says.

Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
Airbnb launches a program to help renters find an apartment in 25 US markets and then list a spare room or occasionally the whole apartment on the platform  —  Airbnb really wants you to Airbnb an apartment.  So its latest step is to find renters a place, which they can also list on the travel booking platform.

Samantha Cole / VICE:
Meta permanently bans Pornhub’s Instagram account for “repeatedly violating” its policies, after a three-week suspension and ToS breaches accruing over 10 years  —  Pornhub claims its account was “fully PG,” and cites the uneven treatment of mainstream celebrities like Kim Kardashian …

Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
Sources: the EU plans light-touch rules for Airbnb and other rental companies, including providing data on usership, in a bid to unify laws across the bloc  —  Airbnb (ABNB.O) and other short-term home rental companies will have to provide data on numbers using their services and how many nights …

Edward Ongweso Jr / VICE:
Report: customers are using doorbell cameras like Amazon’s Ring to monitor, control, and punish delivery drivers, such as sharing footage online to shame them  —  A Data & Society report interviewed doorbell camera users and delivery drivers to understand how surveillance is affecting both, for the worse.

Chloe Xiang / VICE:
Text-to-image generation systems like DALL-E and Midjourney use datasets built by scrapping images without explicit permission and it’s not easy to opt out  —  In one stark example of how sensitive images can end up powering these AI tools, a user found a medical image in the LAION dataset …