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Facebook, Amazon, and Hundreds of Companies Post Targeted Job Ads That Screen Out Older Workers (vox.com)
Older workers are accusing Facebook, Ikea, and hundreds of other companies for discriminating against job seekers in their 50s and 60s through targeted job ads posted on Facebook. From a report: The Communications Workers of America, a labor union representing 700,000 media workers across the country, added the companies to a class-action lawsuit on Tuesday, which was filed in California federal court in December. In its original complaint, the labor union accused Amazon, T-Mobile, and Cox Media Group of doing the same thing. The case, Bradley v. T-Mobile, has major implications for US employers, who routinely buy job ads on Facebook to reach users. The plaintiffs argue that Amazon, T-Mobile, Ikea, Facebook, and hundreds of other companies target the ads so they are only seen by younger Facebook users.
The lawsuit revolves around Facebook's unique business model, which lets advertisers micro-target the network's users based on their interests, city, age, and other demographic information. In the past, equal rights advocates have sued Facebook for accepting ads that discriminate against consumers based on their religion, race, and gender. Facebook has argued that the company is not legally responsible when other companies buy ads that violate the law.
The lawsuit revolves around Facebook's unique business model, which lets advertisers micro-target the network's users based on their interests, city, age, and other demographic information. In the past, equal rights advocates have sued Facebook for accepting ads that discriminate against consumers based on their religion, race, and gender. Facebook has argued that the company is not legally responsible when other companies buy ads that violate the law.
What are the potential negative consequences if Facebook knows my real name and where and when I went to high school?
Anymore? Not a whole lot at the individual level. There was a time when anyone could look at your profile and stalk you that way, but there has since been controls put in place to keep that from happening without a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms (aka, hacking) facebook uses to generate the pages it sends you.
On the whole no one cares about you and your daily grind. The fear of wholesale turning over of logs to law enforcement for no reason seem to be unfounded as well as the delusion that you are interesting enough for, say, intelligence services to want to know more about you. I think it says more about the people who continue to fight against the service than those who use it to reconnect with friends and family members they wouldn't otherwise know anything about.
However, that isn't to say that there's no danger. These lie more in being the target of individualized advertising and propaganda. These are more dangers of aggregation, how you can be grouped together with other people, which is what TFA is talking about.
What I'm saying is this: by and large older workers are less productive.
For a job like a Walmart associate where you learn the whole job in a few weeks? Sure. For an engineering position, where you accumulate years of wisdom about how not to do things? Not so much.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.