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Facebook Users Sue Over Alleged Racial Discrimination In Housing, Job Ads (arstechnica.com)
In response to a report from ProPublica alleging that Facebook gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls "Ethnic Affinities," three Facebook users have filed a lawsuit against the company. They are accusing the social networking giant of violating the Federal Housing Act of 1964 over its alleged discriminatory policies. Ars Technica reports: ProPublica managed to post an ad placed in Facebook's housing categories that excluded anyone with an "affinity" for African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic people. When the ProPublica reporters showed the ad to prominent civil rights lawyer John Relman, he described it as "horrifying" and "as blatant a violation of the federal Fair Housing Act as one can find." According to the proposed class-action lawsuit, by allowing such ads on its site, Facebook is in violation of the landmark civil rights legislation, which specifically prohibits housing advertisements to discriminate based on race, gender, color, religion, and other factors. "This lawsuit does not seek to end Facebook's Ad Platform, nor even to get rid of the "Exclude People" mechanism. There are legal, desirable uses for such functionalities. Plaintiffs seek to end only the illegal proscribed uses of these functions," the lawyers wrote in the civil complaint, which was filed last Friday. The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because the ad's buyer used the Ad Platform's 'Exclude People' functionality to exclude the class member based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, or national origin."
Uber does it too...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The allegedly-violated itself obviously violates the First Amendment and is thus invalid.
It is both unconstitutional, which should be enough in theory, and ineffective in practice — quite obviously, the interracial relations in this country continue to stink despite (or because of?) our having a half-Black President.
Whatever it was we tried for over 50 years to achieve racial harmony, is not working. Let's stop sacrificing actual rights to it...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This sort of crap is exactly how we end up with (for example) the likely next president saying she wants to make gun manufacturers liable for the criminal use of their products. Issues like that sound like single-topic voter hot buttons, but they're not. The instinct to look for the nearest deep(er) pockets and blame the existence of a tool for how someone else uses it ... that's the sort of thing that this election is all about. Because this election is really about the Supreme Court.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A bunch of lawyers found three Facebook users who'd agree to have their names thrown onto a lawsuit so they could cash in on some of that big class-action legal fee action.
As usual, the winners will be the lawyers.
Log in or piss off.
I'm just starting to not care. You know, the rest of us, what ever color our skin is, background is, we're getting sick and tired of it.
Most of us are normal decent people regardless of skin color in Canada. Some people are assholes but they're not the many. We're all, tired, of your retarded, self centered, racist bullshit agenda. We're tired of hearing, we're tired of your retardedness, it's like as soon as people can stop being racist some corporate or government agency panicks and points out more racist shit like they're afraid people will get over it and start ignoring the little shits that still keep doing this shit.
There's eyes wide open posts that don't want 'white people due to cultural differences of people of color'. Seriously, if you're not white, it's okay because you're looking for like minded individuals and filters by skin color apparently makes that easier, but the other way around and it's fucking international news over a god damn housing ad.
Tell you what, you go fix the rest of the fucking world first, where tons of racist bigots exist in the largest populations, then come and deal with the 400 million people in north america. Go fix the 8 billion people populating the rest of the world first.
If I see that garbage I'll deal with it on the community level, where it matters, but this sensationalism distraction 15 minutes of fame internation super racism profile agenda garbage is sickening.
Why is it okay to hate Indians but not others?
It is not okay to hate Indians, or to hate anyone, for that matter. It is not okay to bash without reason, to discriminate, or to fail to treat someone with respect.
I distinguish this from the idea of protecting American jobs and wages, from preventing employers bringing in foreign nationals solely for the purpose of displacing higher paid American workers and depressing wages for those who remain. And those employers often don't treat the hired foreign nationals equally or with respect, either.
Are you perhaps fighting the wrong battle here?
Maybe because we're tired of you calling from "Windows" saying "Your computer are have virus".
https://www.propublica.org/documents/item/3191165-Facebook-Propublica-Ad.html
The event was about fighting back if rent is illegally high. They targeted the event at a certain demographic.
I don't know how this becomes "Facebook practices housing discrimination". I don't use or care for Facebook, but this might just be a problem with their advertising system.
I'm not even sure if Propublica would be on the hook if they did make actual housing ads. Facebook is just the platform while Propublica is the one doing the discriminating.
This is not discrimination... that's like saying that subway is discriminating against aliens because they don't advertise on the moon... the whole concept of targeted ads is not discriminator.. its targeted! If by some chance a black person sees one of these housing ads its not like they will be stopped from buying a house.
It seems to me you have misunderstood the bashing going on, or at least understood it differently from how I understand it.
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of bashing: The first is aimed at the companies laying off their workers and then hiring cheaper workers. Whether they're high-school drop outs, college grads, H1B workers, doesn't matter. It is the idea of getting rid of the workforce you HAVE so you can get someone CHEAPER that is bashed.
The second is bashing at the general skill level of the H1B workers, or Indian outsources in general. This is backed up by evidence of companies that started on the outsourcing fad and had to pull things back to America to get the quality back up to what they wanted. Again it is not bashing the Indians, but the skill level of the specific subset of people getting into that line of work.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
The proposed class, if approved by a federal judge in San Francisco, would include any Facebook user in the United States who has "not seen an employment- or housing-related advertisement on Facebook within the last two years because...
This has to be the first time in history someone has been wronged by not being shown an ad
oh, complaining about corporations H1B use is "racist"?
complaining about the huge amount of scammers in India that buy blocks of cellphone numbers to appear as U.S. company or the IRS is "racist"?
Complaining about Indian workers receiving outsourced jobs who then sell proprietary information and customer information is "racist"?
How about the simpler explanation, that you have a chip on your shoulder
This is just as ridiculous as suing a wrench manufacturer because a few people may have used wrenches to commit crimes. I am a landlord and I know that you can't discriminate in housing. Any employer should also know. Why should Facebook have any liability for this sort of misuse of their system? Seems more appropriate for the Justice department to file a warrant with Facebook and go after every business (if any) that committed these (highly traceable) crimes. This reeks of an inventive attempt by attorneys williammost@gmail.com, jrf@atalawgroup.com and smkh@atalawgroup.com to generate a large class that will make the attorneys megabucks and the plaintiffs nothing.
Note that ProPublica posted the racist ad themselves, and there was no actual discrimination.
Furthermore, this is about ad targeting by demographics, not housing discrimination; you know, like you don't want to target Hip Hop events to Norwegian bachelor farmers, or gay pride events to Black protestant church goers. And if ad targeting is discriminatory for a specific product, then it's the advertiser, not the publisher, that's at fault.
You aren't paying attention. ProPublica is complaining about ad targeting. Translated into the real world, that means that if you place an ad in the East Hampton Star, you also need to place it on Black Entertainment Network. That's obviously ridiculous. Advertisers frequently target specific demographics. The law only requires that the ads themselves don't discriminate (and even that is more political posturing than effective public policy).
Suppose for the moment the story is true: people buying ad space from Facebook can ask the automated algorithm to only show their ads to certain demographics. Those who posted the ads may very well have violated the law, but how does it make Facebook responsible? They aren't checking each and every ad for legal compliance, after all, and the ads don't represent Facebook itself.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users) but it may have legal teeth, depending on the previous contours of the liability shield of 47 USC 230.
ProPublica's ad didn't violate the Fair Housing Act; they advertised for a public speaking event, not for housing.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Regardless of what you think or feel, it isn't "general consensus" till you demonstrate that it is.
It's a tool people. It allows bacon manufacturers to not piss off Muslims or Jewish people by spamming them with coupons for their products. It allows businesses to target their advertising dollars. If illegal discrimination is occurring, go after the parties discriminating, not everyone in-between. Is ProPublica going after Apple next if they manage to post a discriminating ad from an iPad?
No, it's valuable experience
Actually, it isn't. Software developers are not interchangeable cogs in a machine. Each project has unique considerations, unique requirements, unique properties all of which makes it pretty much impossible to apply broad generalizations. What stage is the project in? How tightly defined are the requirements? How experienced are the people managing it? Have they ever managed a remote team before? How flexible is the design? Does it even make sense to use this technology? etc etc etc. Its typically "MBA style thinking" to lump us engineers into one giant bucket of nerds - which ironically leads to _more_ outsourcing because all they see is a cost center.
The CTO eventually told them to fuck off, we hired 4 more developers inhouse, and got the entire project completed in 6 months alongside our other duties.
Then it sounds like you guys are incompetent at evaluating whether a company is capable of servicing your needs.
Tilting at windmills means that you're attacking something as though it's an enemy when it's something entirely mundane. It's a reference to Don Quixote, in which the delusional protagonist attacks a windmill on horseback thinking it's a giant. Tilting is a jousting term, and Holland has quite a lot of windmills.
Suing Facebook over this just seems silly. For one, can anyone show that this actually happened outside the ProPublica report? Did anyone bring it to Facebook's attention before filing a lawsuit? Does their TOS for advertisers include language about making sure ads aren't violating applicable laws? If so, they're already in the clear, but it shouldn't take much to get them to go a little further and block the option for real estate ads.
The plural of anecdote is not data.
No, it's valuable experience. A lot of us have been through it, some repeatedly. My company decided to contract to India to build a new CRM-style application for our call center. 18 months later, it still didn't work; not that it just needed polishing, I mean you couldn't even start the fucking JBoss instance because there were too many errors. We never did see the thing run, just mockups. The CTO eventually told them to fuck off, we hired 4 more developers inhouse, and got the entire project completed in 6 months alongside our other duties.
Had we just hired *one* local developer at the conception of the project, and kept everything internal, we would have saved a year, several hundred thousand dollars in human fees, and whatever else was lost in productivity while we sat on our ass waiting for deliverables to be needfully done. The CxOs learned the hard way, and nowadays the word "India" is a curse in our office.
Well I have been on both sides of many such things. In many cases, the projects fail for very very predictable reasons: 1. Management always selects the lowest cost bidder. There is some kind of feeling that automagically the risk is transferred to the vendor who has been foolish enough to bid at the lowest cost. 2. Vendors are so keen to please the client that they forget the basics of how to avoid SNAFUs. The only question vendor's management permits their people on the ground is 'how high' when they are told by the client to jump. 3. Greedy vendors in turn put in quotes which would be very difficult to do at margins which are barely justifiable. Once the contract is one vendor's management look at increasing their margins and replace experienced and expensive people with many cheap, fresh graduates. 4. Projects themselves are started because of what somebody read in a newspaper or a vendor journal or similar outlet for the hype cycle of IT. There is no chance that it would ever succeed because of the business case is based on false premises. I could go on..But none of these are unique to India, you can experience them with any set of companies anywhere in the world. The only people who think these are unique would be people with limited world experience and an insular mindset.
An alternate use: You're selling pork products but don't want to market to people who are Muslim, Jewish, or vegetarian/vegan.
However, that's not what's happening in this case. The problem is that FB brought out the tool and the only restriction against using it for illegal discriminatory purposes is essentially a little checkbox (probably sans even the checkbox) saying "we promise we won't use this to illegally discriminate."
So what's needed is one or more of
a) Proper review of ads to ensure the tool isn't being used for illegal purposes. Probably not going to happen as human-reviewing ads costs money, and - if the USPTO is any example - still subject to error/ambivalence
b) A system to better restrict use of the tool from cases where it is likely to be discriminatory (not so easy given all the things that you could advertise)
c) A better system for identifying, flagging, and possibly prosecuting malicious/illegal use
Otherwise, it's great to have a choice of such a system, but not at the expense of it being so ripe for abuse. Some categories much less sense and are more open to abuse than others, as well.
Ridiculous. You hate people who hate Indians. Ergo, there are definitely situations where it is acceptable to hate.
You are advocating for total nihilism.
And the situation here is the same as it has always been. The vast majority of robberies of cab drivers are black men. The vast majority of cab drivers, including black men who are cab drivers, do not pick up black men because it is in their mind not worth the risk.
The reason this particular issue never gets more traction is relatively few cab drivers are white these days, and since only white people can be racist, the issue blows up once people like you realize it is non-white people discriminating against black people.
Really, the solution needs to be figuring out how to make black men less likely to commit crimes. How do you do that? I haven't got a clue. But no one is going to stop discriminating unless they are rich in lily white suburbs isolated from the realities of the world around them.
You're not special. You're one of a hundred million internet keyboard warriors typing such drivel makes them a good person.
Ask anyone who ever had to suffer from some big company's tech support whether they are ok with discriminating against Indians. I dare you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's what you get for trying to take the easy way out! Now he'll have to tell all those (insert relevant racist slurs here) that "he'll call them" or that "it's already taken", just like everyone else!
On a less cynical note, you can't fight racism that way. I'd rather want to know beforehand that some landlord is a racist bastard, it saves me time, he won't let to me anyway and I sure as fuck don't want to rent from him!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Because if we don't protect American Jobs, American workers who have lost their job will break into your apartment and steal your stuff.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Ridiculous. You hate people who hate Indians. Ergo, there are definitely situations where it is acceptable to hate.
I have no idea how you got that from "It's not ok to hate anybody". You know just because you don't hate one person doesn't mean you have to hate another person, right?
You are advocating for total nihilism.
Do you even know what that is? I don't think you do, because the OP said absolutely nothing that even relates to nihilism.
And the situation here is the same as it has always been. The vast majority of robberies of cab drivers are black men. The vast majority of cab drivers, including black men who are cab drivers, do not pick up black men because it is in their mind not worth the risk.
So? I have no idea if that is true, I have serious doubts considering I have black friends who don't complain about not being able to get cabs, and I know I personally have never been asked what race I was when I called a cab to come pick me up, but still, what does that have to do with hating anybody? Are you seriously saying black men hate black men?
The reason this particular issue never gets more traction is relatively few cab drivers are white these days, and since only white people can be racist, the issue blows up once people like you realize it is non-white people discriminating against black people.
Really, the solution needs to be figuring out how to make black men less likely to commit crimes. How do you do that? I haven't got a clue. But no one is going to stop discriminating unless they are rich in lily white suburbs isolated from the realities of the world around them.
You're not special. You're one of a hundred million internet keyboard warriors typing such drivel makes them a good person.
The racism in this particular paragraph is just astounding. I don't even know where to start. I think it pretty much speaks for itself.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
They were designed decades ago when hiring large amount of workers to do manual labor jobs was common and the only alternative to these jobs was unemployment for many black people. This is why performance reviews and statistics are often used in the lawsuits.
I know, where these laws came from. That does not answer my challenge regarding moral justification...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Only in America do we have people that are upset that they *DIDN'T* see an advertisement.
Another imagined injury to try to steal from others.