Communications of the ACM
Tech Companies Are Helping Landlords Evict Tenants
A screenshot from Reliant's website, which shows "case studies" of its technology being used to evict tenants.
Credit: Reliant Safety
Tech companies are increasingly selling "smart home" technologies to landlords to spy on tenants in order to evict them or raise their rent.
"You CAN raise rents in NYC!" reads the headline of one email sent to landlords from Teman, a tech company that makes surveillance systems for apartment buildings.
Housing advocates and surveillance experts say the practice of adopting surveillance technologies against renters has become increasingly common. Examples include facial recognition and biometrics, automated noise and gunshot detection devices, and other systems that attempt to measure activity or movement inside private residences.
"No one has exact numbers, but we've seen growing amounts of surveillance on buildings big and small," says Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
From Vice
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