13 ms·

Facebook Accused by HUD of Housing Bias Over Use of Targeted Ads

111 points by okket 8y ago

charliesharding 8y ago
Hot on the heels of their announcement yesterday. The irony is sweet
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  That's likely WHY they announced they were getting rid of extremists. They would have had knowledge of these charges today, as well as knowledge of other things the government is looking into vis-a-vis their business. So I'd imagine their lawyers are preempting a lot of things because they seem to be entering an age where there is potential to be charged even if you are secondarily associated with criminal activity. (Potential not just for Facebook, but for everyone else too.) It's a crazy time right now, because you never know what some person you provided a service for might do.
  - mcguire 8y ago
    "...you never know what some person you provided a service for might do." Well, you are in the business of knowing everything inferrable about all people, everywhere.
    - cr0sh 8y ago
      > knowing everything inferrable about all people, everywhere. Which makes me wonder if the FAANGs and others will go this route - basically robo-ban people from their services who meet certain criteria (or maybe no criteria at all - maybe some kind of neural network or something decides who should be allowed to use the service and who shouldn't). Make the ban based on various obvious and non-obvious metrics. Like credit score, comments or whatnot made using the service, how they treated other people or products in their comments - as well as things like how they typed, or moved their mouse around, or other info from their browser (or even side-channel info if that can be done from a browser - which it probably can). So once banned - even if they tried to go back with a completely different computer, home address, IP, etc - they'd still eventually get flagged as being banned in the past. Then have a service that all of them use to make a centralized "blacklist". It wouldn't surprise me if they don't already have this in testing in some manner.
- daenz 8y ago
  It's all PR. If a company knows some bad press is about to resurface, they'll try to dominate the news with their own good press. People think it's them being virtuous, but it's all a game.
iscrewyou 8y ago
They were accused before. I thought this was old news. Weren't they being accused of showing certain results to a certain demographic because the advertisers got to call the shots on who saw the ads? This is them getting charged. I think there is a distinction. Now lawyers are involved.
- ams6110 8y ago
  That's fine for some things. E.g. showing an ad for specific hair care products to black people. Not OK for housing/rental ads, credit/mortgage, etc. Facebook should have known better from the start and never enabled that kind of targeting for those types of ads.
  - samfisher83 8y ago
    The thing its not a new law. Its been around for 50 something years. I remember they stressed this in American history and it was on the AP test too.
    - jandrese 8y ago
      Still gets violated all the time too. When my parents bought a house outside New Orleans the realtor flat out told them which neighborhoods would be acceptable for them to look in.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - iscrewyou 8y ago
    Oh I really agree. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I was just saying the headline sounds like old news when it’s not.
  - tfha 8y ago
    Why is it okay sometimes but not all the time? If there are predatory ads for mortgages, there will be predatory ads for snacks and video games as well. The goal of most advertising is to change your consumer behaviors regardless of what best for the consumer. In my opinion it's a huge net negative on society.
anonymfus 8y ago
What we need is a law to make all advertisements and their targeting criteria publicly listed. It will make finding out about such problems much easier.
harrumph 8y ago
Facebook ads in the residential real estate space absolutely allow violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act on the part of real estate agents, sellers, marketers and brokers. The mechanism of FB ad targeting inherently grants permission to exclude groups from ad targeting by way of discriminating on the basis of demographic detail. The FHA was passed to redress the widespread and normalized practices of racial and socioeconomic exclusion from home ownership, and as such FB's practice is a major step backwards in fairness and transparency for persons participating in housing markets. Does anybody know if FB's practice has been attacked in court sooner than this?
Brain_Thief 8y ago
It's important to keep in mind that FaceBook is an enterprise founded by an individual who appears to have many of the traits of sociopathy, and that an overwhelming amount of shady, anti-privacy, socially-destructive, and downright exploitative behavior has been credibly attributed to them over the years. The second sentence of TFA claims that the HUD's opinion of FaceBook is that the company "...enables and encourages discrimination based on things like race and religion, as well as sex, by restricting who can see housing-related ads on its platforms and across the Internet." This should come as no surprise from a company with the kind of track record that FaceBook has; the company's founding purpose was, after all, to judge people based on superficial traits. Rot of this kind, when located in the head of an organization or creature, does not go away easily. It has been obvious for some time now that the culture in the leadership echelons of FaceBook is deeply amoral and disinterested in societal health. Although it's a very touchy subject (especially around tech sites), I think there's a strong justification to start really questioning whether or not a person who is interested in the health of society can continue working for FaceBook.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  I find it interesting that you are getting downvotes, but no replies. Come on people, if you disagree, why not say why you disagree? Just downvoting isn't helping the discussion.
- ams6110 8y ago
  I agree. Facebook is no doubt a great place to learn about building software at massive scale while earning a ton of money. But at some point you have to step back and look at the impact of what you are doing.
piokoch 8y ago
I am not sure I understand the way Fair Housing Act is enforced. Facebook allows ads targeting. This is how it earns money. Apparently some people decided that they want to advertise houses to white Christians population, which is illegal in the USA - shouldn't be HUD after those who configured such criteria, not Facebook? Facebook provided only a tool. Nobody is after hardware store because a hammer bought there was used to kill someone.
- dave5104 8y ago
  Using your analogy, this is probably more akin to somebody going after a hardware store specializing in hammers to kill people. Sure, the government could spend the time trying to track down each individual patron and bring individual charges against each of them, but it's probably easier to go after the supplier and cut everyone off.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    For that, the shop must be in violation of a law. I am not a lawyer, but there are plenty of cases where the crime is punishable, but goods and services involved are not, even though these are clearly designed to facilitate.
- techntoke 8y ago
  I guess you don't remember Backpage getting taken down? Facebook creates the market for these types of targeted advertising to exist, and they should have at least a basic understanding of the laws and not permit companies to advertise to certain demographics when it would be in clear violation of the law. That's like saying, oh we were too oblivious to understand how the platform we created could be used while we still profited significantly from our mistakes in the meantime.
  - thinkingkong 8y ago
    Yeah and Ill argue that in todays current environment thats the “correct” business decision because thats how all the forces line up to push you.
caprese 8y ago
Why are they not just subpoening Facebook to go after the people that actually did the ad targeting? It is probably happening but it would make more sense, and Facebook would understand the stance of the enforcement agency. Since HUD or a private citizen already is doing this, Facebook probably offered non-answers or something cocky and then got slapped with this.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  They might be. It's got to be easier from an enforcement point of view to go after publishers than all the individuals who place ads. They have limited resources, just like the rest of us.
reaperducer 8y ago
There's sometimes a lot of chatter here on HN about a liberal arts education being worthless. I have to wonder if more tech employees had taken classes in ethics, philosophy, and other "soft" subjects, if people in the industry would have a better capacity to make decisions that get their companies in trouble less often. Or at least be able to explain to their superiors why a particular business decision is bad.
- bluedino 8y ago
  >> There's sometimes a lot of chatter here on HN about a liberal arts education being worthless. Plenty of people here will argue that you shouldn't take out $80k in student loans to get a liberal arts degree. Worthelss in a ROI sense But there are a large amount of people here with pretty liberal views. So they certain don't disagree with the viewpoint.
  - rhodysurf 8y ago
    liberal arts != liberal viewpoints
  - noer 8y ago
    Full disclosure: I have a liberal arts degree. When I was looking at colleges, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. In high school, I really hated science and math classes. Years later I realized that I actually didn't but the single math teacher I had for four years of high school (it was a small school, I just had bad luck with what teachers were assigned to the classes I took). If I had gone to college with the goal of a career that I thought I would have been suited for, I probably would be doing something much different. I picked a school that offered me the opportunity to study a broad range of topics and had a curriculum based in seminars & discussion. Rather than learning technical subject or a trade, I learned how to accomplish tasks independently. What I feel I got were the skills to teach myself anything. Sure I'd need to learn harder career based skills, but I knew how to best teach myself something IMO, that's no different than a career paths that requires additional schooling to get a job. Looking back, I think it's ridiculous that we ask 16-18 year olds to make decisions about their careers.
SudoEpoch 8y ago
This is kind of ironic in many aspects but the most is one of members under HUD worked for Cambridge Analytica.
LarryDarrell 8y ago
We have regulations on the books that are there as a result of 100 years of painful human experience. Wave a computer screen in someone's face and all of a sudden it's a different plane of existence and some people feel like these laws don't apply. I'm glad to see there is finally being some push back.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > some people feel like these laws don't apply That's catchy, but doesn't address the crucial question of which people should be held accountable for using a tool in a discriminatory way. You could argue that the publisher bears some or all of that responsibility, and I'd be fine with that, but shouldn't the advertisers bear some too? Why is HUD only going after Facebook and not them? Hint: the advertisers don't have all of that juicy user data.
  - LarryDarrell 8y ago
    FB is a great big platform. Of course they are going to be targeted first. Especially since they have the ability to stop the problem, just as the classified editor at a newspaper can decide, "No, I won't run this ad that says "No Blacks". As that would be a bad idea for both myself and the newspaper given the laws on the books that everyone knows about." Given a finite amount of law enforcement manpower, it makes sense to target the pimp first. Especially if they are national in scale and flaunting it.
  - zwkrt 8y ago
    Why do people have this notion that Facebook is some unbiased public space, like an undisturbed forest or a beach where passersby can pedal their wares or something? Facebook is like a dystopian shopping mall combined with Clockwerk Orange reeducation techniques. Due to it's algorithmic nature, Facebook ultimately decides every single post, ad, like, and person you see, and in what order. Creating a housing ad and targeting white people is not like putting an ad on the smooth jazz station, it is like having a storefront in the rich-whites-only section of the Facebook mall. In fact it's even worse because other people don't even know the rich-whites-only section exists, since they can never see it, even if they are your friend! I actually have a hard time imagining how an online system could reinforce existing class and race structures any more than Facebook currently does, short of disallowing users to become friends if it detects that this would be financially disadvantageous to allow.
fareesh 8y ago
I remember reading an Obama administration report about this in 2016, but nothing ever came out of it. Nice to see Dr. Carson take up this issue.
40acres 8y ago
Big tech is going to have to learn how to balance automation with social history. Race based housing discrimination has a long history in America, it's hard to believe that no one in a position of power to question these methods brought up how these ads could be used to discriminate. The biggest benefit that diversity will have on big tech is alternative views that prevent these embarrassments from occuring. Seems every few months another company comes to the realization that it's models simply don't have the social context to be effective.
yardie 8y ago
They're probably going to settle. This is not new and there is already precedent[1] about these sort of postings. Even a halfwit counsel could have told them this wasn't allowed. I've been seeing this go on for a while and I'm not surprised at all. I'm more surprised it took this long. As soon as they added rentals and properties to their marketplace they should have immediately tweaked their algorithms to not fall outside the law [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5540324 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=554032...
CompelTechnic 8y ago
I agree that facebook's advertising practices allowed for illegal discrimination. A good case of "move fast and break things." Some journalists go farther though, and suggest that even the concept of a credit score is racist. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/your-credit-score-is-racist-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/your-c... Consider the 2 possible worlds: 1. One in which disadvantaged minorities have poor credit because of their poor socioeconomic status. Once statistical controls are used to control for socioeconomic status, all ethnic groups are equivalent. 2. One in which, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, disadvantaged minorities still have worse credit than the general population. In both of these worlds, race can be used as a weak predictor of credit quality. Many of the moral claims made by The Guardian are absurd, and overly protectionist. >The insidious notion that our credit history speaks to our reliability as human beings is largely taken for granted. If you, as a business owner, had to choose to hire someone with a good credit score or a bad one, all else being equal, what would you choose? Conscientiousness and intelligence both correlate with socioeconomic status, both being good traits for a worker.
- bearcobra 8y ago
  As an owner, I don't know why the finances of my employee should be any of my business. Even in assessing credit worthiness, there are plenty of flaws with the current system.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    National security reasons if you're a government or contractor, and likewise financial security reasons if you're a corporation.
    - munk-a 8y ago
      The former is valid, the latter I disagree with strongly. Specifically... Too bad. There are costs and risks in employment and employees are exposed to lots of risks that can result in health issues, sudden termination (layoff) and a myriad of other problems, the slight risk an employer accepts when hiring new employees and investing in training absolutely can be offset by insurance (employers can get targeted insurance against key personnel departures and against sudden wave departures). So... too bad. Violating this layer of privacy yields nearly no business benefit and costs sanity.
tschellenbach 8y ago
Weird that they go after the ad platform instead of the advertisers. Pretty sure magazines also publish stats about their members enabling advertisers to specifically target a certain demographic. Actually the NYTimes does this as well: https://nytmediakit.com/index.php?p=sunday-magazine https://nytmediakit.com/index.php?p=sunday-magazine
- tantalor 8y ago
  Nothing prevents racial minorities purchasing a magazine, unlike FB ads.
throwaway5752 8y ago
“We’re surprised by HUD’s decision, as we’ve been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent” ad discrimination, the company said in a statement. It added that it had been negotiating with the housing agency over the issue, but that the talks had broken down because federal officials were seeking access to too much user information “without adequate safeguards.” Interesting. I also wonder if they are going after the landlords who knowingly discriminated using Facebook as a platform.
- save_ferris 8y ago
  Could definitely see this. They could also be trying to prevent setting a data-sharing precedent that other Federal agencies will look to utilize.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    Yes - I just submitted a related article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19516173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19516173) that has additional details on the data access request and reports that the investigation has spread to Twitter and Google.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

111 points by okket 8y ago

charliesharding 8y ago

Hot on the heels of their announcement yesterday. The irony is sweet

bilbo0s 8y ago
That's likely WHY they announced they were getting rid of extremists. They would have had knowledge of these charges today, as well as knowledge of other things the government is looking into vis-a-vis their business. So I'd imagine their lawyers are preempting a lot of things because they seem to be entering an age where there is potential to be charged even if you are secondarily associated with criminal activity. (Potential not just for Facebook, but for everyone else too.) It's a crazy time right now, because you never know what some person you provided a service for might do.
- mcguire 8y ago
  "...you never know what some person you provided a service for might do." Well, you are in the business of knowing everything inferrable about all people, everywhere.
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    > knowing everything inferrable about all people, everywhere. Which makes me wonder if the FAANGs and others will go this route - basically robo-ban people from their services who meet certain criteria (or maybe no criteria at all - maybe some kind of neural network or something decides who should be allowed to use the service and who shouldn't). Make the ban based on various obvious and non-obvious metrics. Like credit score, comments or whatnot made using the service, how they treated other people or products in their comments - as well as things like how they typed, or moved their mouse around, or other info from their browser (or even side-channel info if that can be done from a browser - which it probably can). So once banned - even if they tried to go back with a completely different computer, home address, IP, etc - they'd still eventually get flagged as being banned in the past. Then have a service that all of them use to make a centralized "blacklist". It wouldn't surprise me if they don't already have this in testing in some manner.
daenz 8y ago
It's all PR. If a company knows some bad press is about to resurface, they'll try to dominate the news with their own good press. People think it's them being virtuous, but it's all a game.

iscrewyou 8y ago

They were accused before. I thought this was old news. Weren't they being accused of showing certain results to a certain demographic because the advertisers got to call the shots on who saw the ads? This is them getting charged. I think there is a distinction. Now lawyers are involved.

ams6110 8y ago
That's fine for some things. E.g. showing an ad for specific hair care products to black people. Not OK for housing/rental ads, credit/mortgage, etc. Facebook should have known better from the start and never enabled that kind of targeting for those types of ads.
- samfisher83 8y ago
  The thing its not a new law. Its been around for 50 something years. I remember they stressed this in American history and it was on the AP test too.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Still gets violated all the time too. When my parents bought a house outside New Orleans the realtor flat out told them which neighborhoods would be acceptable for them to look in.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- iscrewyou 8y ago
  Oh I really agree. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. I was just saying the headline sounds like old news when it’s not.
- tfha 8y ago
  Why is it okay sometimes but not all the time? If there are predatory ads for mortgages, there will be predatory ads for snacks and video games as well. The goal of most advertising is to change your consumer behaviors regardless of what best for the consumer. In my opinion it's a huge net negative on society.

anonymfus 8y ago

What we need is a law to make all advertisements and their targeting criteria publicly listed. It will make finding out about such problems much easier.

harrumph 8y ago

Facebook ads in the residential real estate space absolutely allow violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act on the part of real estate agents, sellers, marketers and brokers. The mechanism of FB ad targeting inherently grants permission to exclude groups from ad targeting by way of discriminating on the basis of demographic detail. The FHA was passed to redress the widespread and normalized practices of racial and socioeconomic exclusion from home ownership, and as such FB's practice is a major step backwards in fairness and transparency for persons participating in housing markets. Does anybody know if FB's practice has been attacked in court sooner than this?

Brain_Thief 8y ago

It's important to keep in mind that FaceBook is an enterprise founded by an individual who appears to have many of the traits of sociopathy, and that an overwhelming amount of shady, anti-privacy, socially-destructive, and downright exploitative behavior has been credibly attributed to them over the years. The second sentence of TFA claims that the HUD's opinion of FaceBook is that the company "...enables and encourages discrimination based on things like race and religion, as well as sex, by restricting who can see housing-related ads on its platforms and across the Internet." This should come as no surprise from a company with the kind of track record that FaceBook has; the company's founding purpose was, after all, to judge people based on superficial traits. Rot of this kind, when located in the head of an organization or creature, does not go away easily. It has been obvious for some time now that the culture in the leadership echelons of FaceBook is deeply amoral and disinterested in societal health. Although it's a very touchy subject (especially around tech sites), I think there's a strong justification to start really questioning whether or not a person who is interested in the health of society can continue working for FaceBook.

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
I find it interesting that you are getting downvotes, but no replies. Come on people, if you disagree, why not say why you disagree? Just downvoting isn't helping the discussion.
ams6110 8y ago
I agree. Facebook is no doubt a great place to learn about building software at massive scale while earning a ton of money. But at some point you have to step back and look at the impact of what you are doing.

piokoch 8y ago

I am not sure I understand the way Fair Housing Act is enforced. Facebook allows ads targeting. This is how it earns money. Apparently some people decided that they want to advertise houses to white Christians population, which is illegal in the USA - shouldn't be HUD after those who configured such criteria, not Facebook? Facebook provided only a tool. Nobody is after hardware store because a hammer bought there was used to kill someone.

dave5104 8y ago
Using your analogy, this is probably more akin to somebody going after a hardware store specializing in hammers to kill people. Sure, the government could spend the time trying to track down each individual patron and bring individual charges against each of them, but it's probably easier to go after the supplier and cut everyone off.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  For that, the shop must be in violation of a law. I am not a lawyer, but there are plenty of cases where the crime is punishable, but goods and services involved are not, even though these are clearly designed to facilitate.
techntoke 8y ago
I guess you don't remember Backpage getting taken down? Facebook creates the market for these types of targeted advertising to exist, and they should have at least a basic understanding of the laws and not permit companies to advertise to certain demographics when it would be in clear violation of the law. That's like saying, oh we were too oblivious to understand how the platform we created could be used while we still profited significantly from our mistakes in the meantime.
- thinkingkong 8y ago
  Yeah and Ill argue that in todays current environment thats the “correct” business decision because thats how all the forces line up to push you.

caprese 8y ago

Why are they not just subpoening Facebook to go after the people that actually did the ad targeting? It is probably happening but it would make more sense, and Facebook would understand the stance of the enforcement agency. Since HUD or a private citizen already is doing this, Facebook probably offered non-answers or something cocky and then got slapped with this.

amanaplanacanal 8y ago
They might be. It's got to be easier from an enforcement point of view to go after publishers than all the individuals who place ads. They have limited resources, just like the rest of us.

reaperducer 8y ago

There's sometimes a lot of chatter here on HN about a liberal arts education being worthless. I have to wonder if more tech employees had taken classes in ethics, philosophy, and other "soft" subjects, if people in the industry would have a better capacity to make decisions that get their companies in trouble less often. Or at least be able to explain to their superiors why a particular business decision is bad.

bluedino 8y ago
>> There's sometimes a lot of chatter here on HN about a liberal arts education being worthless. Plenty of people here will argue that you shouldn't take out $80k in student loans to get a liberal arts degree. Worthelss in a ROI sense But there are a large amount of people here with pretty liberal views. So they certain don't disagree with the viewpoint.
- rhodysurf 8y ago
  liberal arts != liberal viewpoints
- noer 8y ago
  Full disclosure: I have a liberal arts degree. When I was looking at colleges, I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. In high school, I really hated science and math classes. Years later I realized that I actually didn't but the single math teacher I had for four years of high school (it was a small school, I just had bad luck with what teachers were assigned to the classes I took). If I had gone to college with the goal of a career that I thought I would have been suited for, I probably would be doing something much different. I picked a school that offered me the opportunity to study a broad range of topics and had a curriculum based in seminars & discussion. Rather than learning technical subject or a trade, I learned how to accomplish tasks independently. What I feel I got were the skills to teach myself anything. Sure I'd need to learn harder career based skills, but I knew how to best teach myself something IMO, that's no different than a career paths that requires additional schooling to get a job. Looking back, I think it's ridiculous that we ask 16-18 year olds to make decisions about their careers.

SudoEpoch 8y ago

This is kind of ironic in many aspects but the most is one of members under HUD worked for Cambridge Analytica.

LarryDarrell 8y ago

We have regulations on the books that are there as a result of 100 years of painful human experience. Wave a computer screen in someone's face and all of a sudden it's a different plane of existence and some people feel like these laws don't apply. I'm glad to see there is finally being some push back.

notacoward 8y ago
> some people feel like these laws don't apply That's catchy, but doesn't address the crucial question of which people should be held accountable for using a tool in a discriminatory way. You could argue that the publisher bears some or all of that responsibility, and I'd be fine with that, but shouldn't the advertisers bear some too? Why is HUD only going after Facebook and not them? Hint: the advertisers don't have all of that juicy user data.
- LarryDarrell 8y ago
  FB is a great big platform. Of course they are going to be targeted first. Especially since they have the ability to stop the problem, just as the classified editor at a newspaper can decide, "No, I won't run this ad that says "No Blacks". As that would be a bad idea for both myself and the newspaper given the laws on the books that everyone knows about." Given a finite amount of law enforcement manpower, it makes sense to target the pimp first. Especially if they are national in scale and flaunting it.
- zwkrt 8y ago
  Why do people have this notion that Facebook is some unbiased public space, like an undisturbed forest or a beach where passersby can pedal their wares or something? Facebook is like a dystopian shopping mall combined with Clockwerk Orange reeducation techniques. Due to it's algorithmic nature, Facebook ultimately decides every single post, ad, like, and person you see, and in what order. Creating a housing ad and targeting white people is not like putting an ad on the smooth jazz station, it is like having a storefront in the rich-whites-only section of the Facebook mall. In fact it's even worse because other people don't even know the rich-whites-only section exists, since they can never see it, even if they are your friend! I actually have a hard time imagining how an online system could reinforce existing class and race structures any more than Facebook currently does, short of disallowing users to become friends if it detects that this would be financially disadvantageous to allow.

fareesh 8y ago

I remember reading an Obama administration report about this in 2016, but nothing ever came out of it. Nice to see Dr. Carson take up this issue.

40acres 8y ago

Big tech is going to have to learn how to balance automation with social history. Race based housing discrimination has a long history in America, it's hard to believe that no one in a position of power to question these methods brought up how these ads could be used to discriminate. The biggest benefit that diversity will have on big tech is alternative views that prevent these embarrassments from occuring. Seems every few months another company comes to the realization that it's models simply don't have the social context to be effective.

yardie 8y ago

They're probably going to settle. This is not new and there is already precedent[1] about these sort of postings. Even a halfwit counsel could have told them this wasn't allowed. I've been seeing this go on for a while and I'm not surprised at all. I'm more surprised it took this long. As soon as they added rentals and properties to their marketplace they should have immediately tweaked their algorithms to not fall outside the law [1] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5540324 https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=554032...

CompelTechnic 8y ago

I agree that facebook's advertising practices allowed for illegal discrimination. A good case of "move fast and break things." Some journalists go farther though, and suggest that even the concept of a credit score is racist. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/your-credit-score-is-racist-heres-why https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/13/your-c... Consider the 2 possible worlds: 1. One in which disadvantaged minorities have poor credit because of their poor socioeconomic status. Once statistical controls are used to control for socioeconomic status, all ethnic groups are equivalent. 2. One in which, even after controlling for socioeconomic status, disadvantaged minorities still have worse credit than the general population. In both of these worlds, race can be used as a weak predictor of credit quality. Many of the moral claims made by The Guardian are absurd, and overly protectionist. >The insidious notion that our credit history speaks to our reliability as human beings is largely taken for granted. If you, as a business owner, had to choose to hire someone with a good credit score or a bad one, all else being equal, what would you choose? Conscientiousness and intelligence both correlate with socioeconomic status, both being good traits for a worker.

bearcobra 8y ago
As an owner, I don't know why the finances of my employee should be any of my business. Even in assessing credit worthiness, there are plenty of flaws with the current system.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  National security reasons if you're a government or contractor, and likewise financial security reasons if you're a corporation.
  - munk-a 8y ago
    The former is valid, the latter I disagree with strongly. Specifically... Too bad. There are costs and risks in employment and employees are exposed to lots of risks that can result in health issues, sudden termination (layoff) and a myriad of other problems, the slight risk an employer accepts when hiring new employees and investing in training absolutely can be offset by insurance (employers can get targeted insurance against key personnel departures and against sudden wave departures). So... too bad. Violating this layer of privacy yields nearly no business benefit and costs sanity.

tschellenbach 8y ago

Weird that they go after the ad platform instead of the advertisers. Pretty sure magazines also publish stats about their members enabling advertisers to specifically target a certain demographic. Actually the NYTimes does this as well: https://nytmediakit.com/index.php?p=sunday-magazine https://nytmediakit.com/index.php?p=sunday-magazine

tantalor 8y ago
Nothing prevents racial minorities purchasing a magazine, unlike FB ads.

throwaway5752 8y ago

“We’re surprised by HUD’s decision, as we’ve been working with them to address their concerns and have taken significant steps to prevent” ad discrimination, the company said in a statement. It added that it had been negotiating with the housing agency over the issue, but that the talks had broken down because federal officials were seeking access to too much user information “without adequate safeguards.” Interesting. I also wonder if they are going after the landlords who knowingly discriminated using Facebook as a platform.

save_ferris 8y ago
Could definitely see this. They could also be trying to prevent setting a data-sharing precedent that other Federal agencies will look to utilize.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  Yes - I just submitted a related article (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19516173 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19516173) that has additional details on the data access request and reports that the investigation has spread to Twitter and Google.

deleted 8y ago

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