HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook • Hacker News Board

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#41

Post by kryogen1c » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

This complaint seems like its shooting itself in the foot - discrimination isn't inherently bad. When you hire, you discriminate based on ability. When you date, you discriminate in a number of ways like beauty, personality, etc. If you're selling ads for wheelchairs you want to discriminate for people with disabilities. If your houses aren't wheelchair accessible, you want your ads to discriminate against people with disabilities. If there are "majority-minority zip codes" then maybe advertising against the demographic is a waste of your time and money.

The idea that we should operate without discrimination is a toothless platitude with little bearing on reality. It is not Facebooks responsibility to change reality because they are able to accurately quantify and qualify it's existence, and sell ads based on their findings.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#42

Post by wtvanhest » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

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…

IMNAL and I dont have a source, but I believe credit agencies were once sued for this type of indirect discrimination. If I remember correctly, the argument was that credit scores unfairly treated some protected classes.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#43

Post by hw » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

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.

Companies operating on Google scale should also have the scale to ensure that their ad platform doesn't enable people to target ads discriminately, especially when it's on something like housing where there are laws against that. They're probably more worried about their quarterly results and shareholders than they are about potential problems until it becomes a big problem.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#44

Post by wtvanhest » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:04 PM UTC

astura wrote: post #37

0x00000000 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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+.

That is not what OP is saying...

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#45

Post by briandear » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:05 PM UTC

austincheney wrote: post #31

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 demographi…

My question would be if an advertiser advertised housing in a demographically targeted publication, for example, a publication focused only on single gay men, if that would necessarily function as discrimination since single mothers wouldn’t be reading that publication, nor those ads. Facebook allows demographic targeting that just happens to be more “effective,” but no more discriminatory that the way conventional targeted “offline” advertising works now. Advertising housing in a newsletter for Jewish people, does that not result in discrimination against non Jews since they wouldn’t see that ad? It seems that as long as the housing and the ad content itself weren’t discriminatory, the law would seem to be upheld. What this suit seems to be saying is that you are obligated to advertise your housing where every protected group would have an equal chance of seeing the ad, anything less would be discriminatory right? The very slippery slope is that housing ads themselves could only appear in official, government publications otherwise some group or another would be discriminated against since they wouldn’t normally see the ad.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#46

Post by EB66 » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:06 PM UTC

dev_dull wrote: post #32

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.

> And that’s not even necessarily a bad thing.

...what? Are you suggesting it's a good thing that we bring back red lining and other discriminatory practices?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#47

Post by briandear » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:07 PM UTC

RightMillennial wrote: post #9

> The Fair Housing Act prohibits discrimination in housing transactions including print and online advertisement on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, disability, or familial status. Emphasis mine. If the FHA does indeed prohibit online advertisement discriminating on those criteria, this sounds pretty damning to Facebook. Those are some of the key features of Facebook ads.

The ads themselves are protected, but wouldn’t the publication venue not be covered? Otherwise housing ads in the Chicago Defender would be illegal right?

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#48

Post by dominotw » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:08 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #30

dominotw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about housing ad posted only in places like whole foods or a particular newspaper. I know my previous landlady did this.

In practice, for better or worse, a lot of things escape notice when done obliquely at small scale.

Yeah I guess there is a balance you have strike in order not to become an Orwellian society.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#49

Post by samfisher83 » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

These are the specific points they are going after:

    -display housing ads either only to men or women;
    -not show ads to Facebook users interested in an "assistance dog," "mobility scooter," "accessibility" or "deaf culture";   
    -not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "child care" or "parenting," or show ads only to users with children above a specified age;
    -to display/not display ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in a particular place of worship, religion or tenet, such as the "Christian Church," "Sikhism," "Hinduism," or the "Bible."
    -not show ads to users whom Facebook categorizes as interested in "Latin America," "Canada," "Southeast Asia," "China," "Honduras," or "Somalia."
    -draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes.

The 1st 4 should have never been allowed. This is a 50 year old law. Its not like its something new.

Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook

#50

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Sat, Aug 18, 2018, 8:12 PM UTC

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #33

koboll wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

> what stops me from advertising my AirBnb listing as a URL on Facebook as a "generic ad"?

By not permitting Airbnb URLs as generic ads.

Edit to ad: and placing a warning if it looks like it might be a housing ad: “this looks like a housing related ad and has been flagged for moderation”