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HUD Files Complaint Alleging Facebook Ad Tools Allow Housing Discrimination (gizmodo.com) 102

Posted by BeauHD from the preferentially-treated dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has filed an official discrimination complaint against Facebook, saying the site's dizzying array of advertising tools makes it simple for advertisers to illegally exclude wide swathes of the population from seeing housing ads, Politico wrote on Friday. In a press release, HUD wrote that Facebook's "targeted advertising" model more or less constitutes a way for said advertisers to skirt the federal Fair Housing Act, specifically by excluding members of protected categories: "HUD claims Facebook enables advertisers to control which users receive housing-related ads based upon the recipient's race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, disability, and/or zip code. Facebook then invites advertisers to express unlawful preferences by offering discriminatory options, allowing them to effectively limit housing options for these protected classes under the guise of 'targeted advertising.'"

Specific examples cited by HUD included showing display ads "either only to men or women," as well as preventing users flagged as interested in disabilities-related topics like "assistance dog" or "accessibility" from seeing display ads. HUD also said that the targeted advertising tool can be used to prevent people interested in specific religions or regions from seeing ads, as well as "draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes." The complaint is just a complaint, but it does start an official process that will either end in Facebook reaching a resolution with federal officials or a lawsuit. CNN Tech notes that the National Fair Housing Alliance is simultaneously suing Facebook for the same reason. "Facebook is trying to dismiss the suit by claiming it has limited liability for user-generated content, though HUD and federal prosecutors claim the site operates as an internet content provider with respect to housing ads and therefore is subject to civil rights law," reports Gizmodo.
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HUD Files Complaint Alleging Facebook Ad Tools Allow Housing Discrimination More

HUD Files Complaint Alleging Facebook Ad Tools Allow Housing Discrimination

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  • It is human nature and a personal goal to want to be able to have a say in what happens in your home, or your property. It is a societal goal to make sure that harmony and opportunity are available to people who live in a country.

    Government is responsible for the 2nd goal, because people's individual desires tend to compete with societal desires. And frankly, government is failing in its job / losing ground in the fight for its purpose in this technology age. Either because our state / federal governme

  • Contest sites have to be careful who they hand a million dollars to...
    Gun sites need to follow 51 sets of laws (federal plus 50 states)...
    Radio streams have to obey local rules on products and prices....
    Google has to target people who will buy the product, they can't just randomly send ads around...

    Facebook has to follow regulations on ads too... sorry, no exemptions to the laws about what you could advertise in the newspaper.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      And some people wonder why others just skirt around the regulations and do shit on the side, away from the oversight of Big Brother.

      As the Laffer Curve applies to taxation, there is a similar curve that applies to regulation in general. Over-regulate, and people will just avoid the system entirely.

  • It's a stupid complaint (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Yes, this tool could be used to discriminate. But that's the point of the tool. If you are selling women's jeans it's perfectly legal to target a particular audience, i.e. women. Do they have any example of using this tool to illegally discriminate against a protected class? If so, file a lawsuit. Otherwise, stop speculating about what it could be used for.

    • Re:It's a stupid complaint (Score:4, Informative)

      by mrwireless ( 1056688 ) on Sunday August 19, 2018 @11:03AM (#57154562)
      First of all, this housing thing has been going on for quite a while now:
      https://www.engadget.com/2017/... [engadget.com]

      Secondly, there are quite a few examples, such as:
      https://consequenceofsound.net... [consequenceofsound.net]

      All this is just the stuff on the surface, where advertisers are abusing Facebook's targeting system. One abstraction layer further you get the Cambridge Analytica stuff. Databrokers taking your Facebook data, and then selling all kinds of derived scores to employers, insurers politicians.

      Women don't see high paying job adds:
      https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]

      Getting red-lighted at job interviews:
      https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]

      Easier to get a loan if you have 'good' friends:
      https://trustingsocial.com/ [trustingsocial.com]

      IRS looking at social media posts to determine who gets an audit:
      https://news.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

      Health insurers figuring out who they want to insure:
      https://www.propublica.org/art... [propublica.org]

      As Cathy o Neill pointed out in her book "Weapons of Math Destruction", all this tech doesn't remove discrimination, it just hides it behind the facade of 'neutral math'.
      • 10 PRINT "Bless this post.";
        20 GOTO 10

        My favorite word to explore in what documentation I come across is "granularity". I had not seen it used since a kid reading about the surface of the sun. Applying relational databases has been overshadowed by networks modeled on neural connectivity, but the latter serves the former. These advances are largely legitimate, but the Valley's greatest minds can't stop social hacking in the name of disruptive commerce and a rentier class has the resources to beg their for
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Note that Facebook lets you opt out of targeting and nobody forces you to give correct demographic information. So, if you want to receive ads targeted to geriatric transgender Asian billionaire midgets, set up your profile accordingly and enjoy!

  • __FaceBook prediction #312__ By 2034, of the 41% of deceased profiles, 22% provide "click farm" jobs for 90.3 million children in developing nations, though any reliable approximation of deceased, but "vital", users will be known only to FB's legal department and a closely guarded trade secret. Thank Colossus for mrwireless' post. I am not surprised there are some on /. asserting on a public forum not to speculate about how proprietary *tools* are *utilized* by FaceBook's-feudal-warlord-culture designed t
  • Personally I think this "discrimination" stuff has gone too far. People should be able to advertise to people who are not disabled (think sport related stuff) and people should be able to advertise to a specific race or language (think the latest season of a spanish soap opera) or they should be able to advertise to an age range (think about a barbara streisand movie) or to a specific sex (what about tampons and eye pencils). I think advertisers as whole need to address this with government so the platform
    • Discrimination Stuff? People with a "disability", who purchase sports items as gifts only rarely or incidentally, are not a significant market to merit retailers not wasting their money? The government ought to assist suppliers and their distribution networks of commodities and manufactured goods to know the character and degree of a disabled person?

      Someone please forward you the ghost of Ferdinand Porsche post haste; You have a world to conquer.

      Stuff? Are you a senator's son?
  • The credit bureaus sell credit scores by zip code. Other companies sell subscription information. In the days of spam snail mail advertising companies did this kind of thing all the time. Want a new credit card or a loan, well unless you lived in the right place you wouldn't know about the best deals.
    • This Kind of Thing All the Time

      It is called redlining [wikipedia.org] and a simultaneously and sufficiently blunt means to result in what I "personally" would characterize as a form of genocide of the Black American male and a banal evil. A "best" deal includes extractive economies and ghettoization. Prior to that-- hangings.

      But to move on, comparing zip codes and credit bureaus (who have of late been rendered meaningless by data breaches so serious the government has only wrung its hands and waits for public attention

  • If I'm interested in seeing eye dogs, I might not necessarily be blind.

    I could be a dog trainer, or an animal lover interested in the topic. I know a lot of people like this.

    Being interested in Islam or Buddhism doesn't necessarily make me either thing, and liking rap music doesn't really say anything about my ethnicity. Although, they might have a point on the zip codes.

    Time will tell.

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