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HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

hud.gov

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Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#31

Post by austincheney »

Here are the likely relevant laws in question:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Housing_Act

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

By law you cannot discriminate by any designation of protected class, which includes not only parties to a business transaction but also messaging and opportunities there upon.

I do understand why Facebook would allow ad display filtering by race and other demographic categorizations since they are a media organization who sells advertising. Whether or not that practice is morally qualified or agreeable it makes sense from a business perspective (oh how I do detest advertising).

What I don't get is why Facebook would allow ad suppliers the option to set values to these filters. Facebook has the data to make optimal demographic determinations for a geographically centered business market. Perhaps this indicates that either Facebook isn't very good at that or that ad supplies prefer to perform their own independent research out of distrust or lack of availability from Facebook.

Anyway, this does look like a valid complaint. I wouldn't just sue Facebook though. I would also seek for discovery of the ad suppliers and sue them as well. Facebook is just the proxy here. Somebody is making a deliberate determination to racial profile in violation of the spirit of the law.

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EDIT. See the third bullet point here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968#Types...

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#32

Post by dev_dull »

yardie wrote: post #26

How did they not see this coming. Are they not familiar with another dotcom called Craigslist who had to deal with this very same regulation years ago. Their counsel either wasn't aware of what FB marketplace was doing or didn't know about FHA laws. > draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes. This alone is really damn damning. I'm going to go out on a…

I’m sure their counsel knows exactly what they’re doing. Sometimes when you’re big and bad enough it’s worth it to take a gamble and see how things will settle in court.

And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing. People and cultures change and so should our regulation and laws.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#33

Post by joelhaasnoot »

koboll wrote: post #16
koenigdavidmj wrote: post #13

Seems to me that the courts and the public are becoming much less tolerant of companies operating on Google scale, where most things are decided by algorithms and a human never sees it at all. This might serve as an upper bound on the size of future companies: if you might have liability for every single ad or comment you let someone post, you’re going to want human review of all that content.

What about this complaint would prevent Facebook from addressing it without humans involved? All they're going to do is revoke microtargeting abilities from housing ads.

How do they determine what's a housing ad?

There's two pieces to this a) Facebook makes this possible and b) Facebook damns themselves and promotes that they make this possible for housing. Part b is easy to fix: make it harder to do housing ads that are targeted. However, part a is much harder: what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#34

Post by 0x00000000 »

astura wrote: post #15
0x00000000 wrote: post #6

>and/or zip code. >effectively limit housing options for these protected classes I have head of zip code being protected or personally identifiable information but never a protected class Also fun fact, "age" as a protected class in the US only refers to discrimination against people over the age of 40.

>Also fun fact, "age" as a protected class in the US only refers to discrimination against people over the age of 40. In employment law, not housing law.

As far as I know HOPA is the only federal law affecting housing age and it allows them to create "senior only" communities. So it is effectively the same. Older people can discriminate against younger people but younger people cannot discriminate against older people.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#36

Post by noobermin »

yardie wrote: post #26

How did they not see this coming. Are they not familiar with another dotcom called Craigslist who had to deal with this very same regulation years ago. Their counsel either wasn't aware of what FB marketplace was doing or didn't know about FHA laws. > draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes. This alone is really damn damning. I'm going to go out on a…

Down the the literal words "red line"[0]. For, I suppose young or otherwise ignorant people, here:

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#37

Post by astura »

0x00000000 wrote: post #34
astura wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Also fun fact, "age" as a protected class in the US only refers to discrimination against people over the age of 40. In employment law, not housing law.

As far as I know HOPA is the only federal law affecting housing age and it allows them to create "senior only" communities. So it is effectively the same. Older people can discriminate against younger people but younger people cannot discriminate against older people.

>Older people can discriminate against younger people

No.

Family status is protected in housing law, so no, a landlord can't refuse to rent to someone because they have young children.

Exceptions apply for certain senior living communities, but they are 55+, not 40+.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#38

Post by zo1 »

sincerely wrote: post #19
tomjen3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, although it seems mostly to be by accident: you can target you facebook ads to whatever group you want, so your bra sales only target women, or your stroller offers only target people with smaller children. Personally I think the law is bullshit: what is interesting, and what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_. But I guess facebook makes for an interesting…

Maybe there's something inherently wrong with targeted ads...

Maybe there's something inherently wrong with thought-policing via "anti-discrimination" laws.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#39

Post by ghaff »

sincerely wrote: post #19
tomjen3 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, although it seems mostly to be by accident: you can target you facebook ads to whatever group you want, so your bra sales only target women, or your stroller offers only target people with smaller children. Personally I think the law is bullshit: what is interesting, and what we want to prevent, isn't landlords who can target only some group, but landlords who _do_. But I guess facebook makes for an interesting…

Maybe there's something inherently wrong with targeted ads...

Pretty much every ad ever written in any medium is targeted to some degree or other.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#40

Post by toddsiegel »

google_censors wrote: post #25
beager wrote: post #12

It would seem fairly straightforward for Facebook to collect information about whether an advertisement pertains to something that has anti-discriminatory regulations tied to it (housing, employment). I generally agree that FB should not be allowed to permit users to segment these types of advertisements by the dimensions claimed. However, what piques my curiosity here is whether “indirect” discrimination in choice o…

There's actually something called "disparate impact" in Fair Housing that covers this. So if someone does something like that, especially intentionally, and it impacts a protected class, they can be sued and fined.

In fact, since most cases are not so blatantly obvious as this, using disparate impact is often how these cases are brought.
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