I think you are dramatically overstating the risk at 0.01%. Suppose past performance predicts future results. AirBnB has had, what, 10 million rental deals? And this has only happened, as far as we can tell, once. That's not an 0.01% risk. It's more like 0.000001%.
Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.
It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.
Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?
Update: Airbnb's new post http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/27/on-safety-a-word-from-airbn... says "undermined what had been – for 2 million nights – a case study demonstrating that people are fundamentally good." If I take that to mean that 2 million nights had been booked via Airbnb to date, then I underestimated the (frequentist) risk by a factor of around 350: 2 million nights are only a quarter of a million weeks, so this is a one-in-a-quarter-million chance, 0.00035% rather than 0.000001%. Also, my original figure, "It's more like 0.000001%," was wrong; that would have been one in a hundred million, not one in ten million. And the original "0.01%" was an overestimate by only about a factor of 300, not ten thousand.
So the risk of this happening to you is not like the risk of dying by traveling 20 kilometers by car, but more like the risk of dying by traveling 700 kilometers by car.
(Of course that's assuming that past performance is some kind of a guide to future results. It could be that all kinds of tweakers are going to get on Airbnb now and trash things that one of their friends has had a taste, or it could be that future people thinking of doing this kind of thing will be deterred by the rapid arrest of the apparent culprit in this case.)
Overstating the risk by a factor of ten thousand is a very substantial exaggeration.
It's hard for human beings to understand very large and very small numbers, so to put that in context, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_traffic_safety says about ten people are killed per billion vehicle kilometers in most developed countries, so perhaps five people per billion passenger kilometers. So you have a one in ten million chance of getting killed by riding about twenty kilometers in a car.
Surely you would not advocate making laws to "protect" "the average person" "from unknowingly gambling with their family's future" by traveling tens of kilometers by car, thus possibly orphaning their children?