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August 18, 2020 08:10 pm

'Landlord Tech Watch' Site Lets You Report Landlords Using Tech To Screw Over Tenants

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A group of activists have released Landlord Tech Watch, a site that allows anyone to report where this "landlord tech" is being used and plot it on a map -- like a version of Nextdoor that turns the tables to hold property owners and real estate companies accountable. The project is the effort of technologists and tenants rights advocates, who say they're aiming to use data to shed light on the use of biometric locks, tenant screening systems, and other technology used by landlords to exert power over tenants. "It just became apparent that these technologies are increasingly being deployed in residential spaces, and there's so little public information about them," Erin McElroy, a postdoctoral researcher at the AI Now Institute and co-founder of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, told Motherboard. McElroy said the project came together following a prominent tenant dispute at Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized building in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The landlord, Robert Nelson, was trying to replace physical key fobs with a facial recognition system, a technology which has been repeatedly shown to exhibit racial bias. The project was abandoned after 136 tenants rallied in protest, filing a legal complaint with the New York State Department of Housing and Community Renewal. "We want to be able to collectively organize tenants from multiple buildings," adds McElroy. "That's the ultimate goal -- whether it be for direct action or policy reform or both."

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