Airbnb said it will hand over data on the website’s users to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is trying to root out New York City hosts who have been breaking subletting laws and failing to pay taxes.
The records initially will be provided to the AG in a way that protects users’ identities, according to the agreement announced Wednesday.
Once Schneiderman reviews the data, he can then request specific names and other personal data to go after users he suspects are breaking a law that bans short-term rentals when the primary resident isn’t home.
“Airbnb and the Office of the Attorney General have worked tirelessly over the past six months to come to an agreement that appropriately balances Attorney General Schneiderman’s commitment to protecting New York’s residents and tourists from illegal hotels with Airbnb’s concerns about the privacy of thousands of other hosts,” according to a joint statement.
“The arrangement we have reached today for compliance with the OAG subpoena strikes this balance.”
In New York, it is illegal to rent out an apartment for less than 30 days unless the owner of the residence is also present. Schneiderman has also argued that Airbnb hosts should be paying the city’s 14.7 percent hotel occupancy tax.
The agreement was reached after a state Supreme Court judge last week quashed a subpoena from the AG’s office requesting a wide range of personal information and data about Airbnb users.
The court ruled that subpoena was too broad, dealing a setback to Schneiderman, who had argued that nearly 60 percent of Airbnb rentals offered in New York City appeared to be illegal.
He vowed to rewrite the subpoena to deal with a “narrow technical issue” cited by the judge.
Despite the early legal victory, the upstart room-rental service, which is aiming to go public as soon as next year, has been seeking to appease the AG’s office in various ways, including plans to start collecting the hotel tax on behalf of its New York users by July 1.