This is simply WEBLINING, an online version of the 1960s Redlining.
See http://www.netopia.eu/weblining-why-eating-at-nandos-could-c...
HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
171–180 of 568 posts
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The slippy slope here is already in operation. It's the entire rationale behind prohibiting targeting based on zip code: demographics change from zip code to zip code, so the HUD concludes that targeting by zip code is de facto targeting by demographic. What logical basis is there for stopping at zip code targeting and not applying the same logic to other demographic correlates?
> The slippy slope here is already in operation. Except there are 40 years of court decisions clarifying how the law should be interpreted.
Most of the case law dates from before internet advertising microtargeting. We're in novel legal territory here.
That said, it's possible that a forward-thinking court has already resolved the question under discussion. Can you point me to case law that discusses the boundary between discriminatory and non-discriminatory ad targeting based on demographic correlates?
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#173Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads? They aren't the ones renting the real estate. They don't own it. Government overreach imo. Edit: grammatical mistakes
Why is Facebook in trouble for this and not the persons who actually placed the ads? Wait for it.
What are we waiting for?
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
There isn't a law on the books prohibiting hardware stores from selling knives. There is a law on the books prohibiting publishers from publishing descriminitory ads, even if they didn't write them. That's the difference.
The difference is that the law shouldn't even be on the books imo. The person discriminating is the private property owner/manager they engaged in the advertising. Facebook did not.
How would a common person know they were discriminated against digitally on Facebook? Why should such a tool geared towards discrimination of protected classes not be held liable when there is no alternative legal use case for allowing filtering of protected classes for displaying of housing ads.
As a user of Facebook, this method of discrimination is markedly different than physically showing up to a house for rent and the home owner taking one look at you, scrunching up their face, and saying it's no longer available, tipping you off that what they are doing is illegal.
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
More generally, housing discrimination will happen at the individual level in all sorts of subtle and not so subtle ways that can’t be generally stopped. That doesn’t mean you throw your hands up and say that we might as allow any sort of discrimination.
If the intent of policy X is to achieve goal Y and X does not in fact achieve Y, what is the point of continuing to pay the costs of X instead of proposing some X' that actually does achieve Y? Continuing to advocate X when X doesn't achieve Y suggests that the proponents of X don't really care about Y, but instead some unstated Z.
Because a simple and easily enforced X that hits 90% of cases is vastly preferable to the 1200 page tome that makes up X’ and requires 175k people to enforce after 20 years of law writing.
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#176A question if you run ads and tune your ad buy to focus on those people with the highest conversion rate. To reduce the amount you're spending by targeting the ads, does this mean that's not allowed? It looks like this is to ensure advertisement reaches all protected categories. Can this mean that one would be forced to advertise in magazines that cater to different audiences? To guarantee a certain subset of the pop…
Compare to jobs. It’s ok to require candidates to speak a minority language iff that has something to do with the job. But it is not ok to require a specific age, gender or marital status.
Landlord ads are more or less like job ads, in that sense.
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#177How 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…
> draw a red line around zip codes and then not display ads to Facebook users who live in specific zip codes. This is actually somewhat odd in this context. Obviously if you're advertising housing in Boston you don't want to be advertising it to people in Washington or China, or probably even Springfield. So you need some way to specify a set of regions and zip code is the obvious way of doing that.
No, specifying individual zip codes sounds like the worst way to do that. The obvious way is to have a max distance slider.
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact, since most cases are not so blatantly obvious as this, using disparate impact is often how these cases are brought.
If only FB had an insane amount of data that could trivially be used to figure out if a given criteria would have a disparate impact. I can’t imag them fighting this, theyvseem so unlikely to win. But then again, I’m surprised corporate counsel wasn’t screaming about this. It’s not the first time I’ve read about this and I don’t work there.
Is your position that it should be illegal to use a criterion in ad targeting if the use of this criterion results in an ad being seen by one arm of a protected category more than another arm?
That's a consistent position, but it amounts to banning of ad targeting. Is that the world you want?
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Our legal system will not hold Facebook liable for a case like that. Should?? Like how things ought to be with the world? Facebook shouldn't even know who prefers organic food. There should be nothing tying that preference to any other aspect of people's lives. Facebook should be more like Reddit where people can have whatever accounts they want and can interact on organic food topics without identifying themselves o…
> Our legal system will not hold Facebook liable for a case like that. I have to disagree with you on that. I'd put money on targeting a housing advertisement toward someone with a preference for organic food to be ruled discriminatory within five years. It's an unavoidable logical consequence of the logic driving today's complaint.
The problem with your argument is FB doesn’t matter to your point.
The law already exists if that will happen as you say, it will happen no matter what FB does.
So why should FB get to ignore the law unlike thousands of other businesses? Why do they get an exception?
Re: HUD Files Housing Discrimination Complaint Against Facebook
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the intent of policy X is to achieve goal Y and X does not in fact achieve Y, what is the point of continuing to pay the costs of X instead of proposing some X' that actually does achieve Y? Continuing to advocate X when X doesn't achieve Y suggests that the proponents of X don't really care about Y, but instead some unstated Z.
Because a simple and easily enforced X that hits 90% of cases is vastly preferable to the 1200 page tome that makes up X’ and requires 175k people to enforce after 20 years of law writing.
In some situations, "perfect is the enemy of the good" is a reasonable approach. Unfortunately, we're not dealing with a good-but-imperfect filter, but a practically useless filter, one that imposes significant costs on top of being ineffective.
"Weapons of Math Destruction" presents good evidence that 90% is much lower than the actual effectiveness of X.