> 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.
I don't buy your argument in the slightest. Slippery slopes exist, but the whole point legally is to NOT allow us to go down such slopes. The law defines the (fuzzy) lines. Once it seems to be slipping down a slope, there will be a point where the law (judges) will stop slipping.
If there's an organic restaurant or grocer in a neighborhood, it makes sense to market to those who prefer organic food. There's nothing stopping anyone of any race or background from preferring organic food other than price or education/awareness etc.
Short of laws that ban targeted advertising in general, there will never be a law saying that you can't target people with some consumer preference.
If you tried to avoid black folks by not showing an ad to people who like stereotypical black consumer products, you'd be more likely to get away with it. There would be some burden of proof that you were doing this as a proxy for the protected class.
The core point is that our laws are more likely to have effective loopholes that undermine the actual intention than to have slippery slopes that take the intention and go way too far with it.
You are misrepresenting my position. Where did I suggest that FB get an exemption from the law? I never said that FB should get special treatment. For clarity, FB should follow the law and prohibit targeting of housing ads based on this list of criteria.
My original point (which has now been downvoted into oblivion, presumably because it raises uncomfortable questions) is that we as an industry need to ask the question "What next?". We know that these regulations will not in fact stop housing discrimination and that more will follow.
It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject, since it's important both legally and economically. All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet. That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.
By now you've posted like 30 comments in this thread and repeatedly broken the site guidelines in multiple ways. Please stop—intense argumentation with sharp elbows is the stuff of flamewars, not intellectually curious discussion.
> We know that these regulations will not in fact stop housing discrimination
We don’t know that. I imagine if that was true it would have been proved clearly in the last 40 years. But the law still exists. I’ve not aware of attempts to repeal it.
> and that more will follow.
Again, we’ve had 40 years for this.
So many people in this thread arguing against HUD seem to be trying to argue like this law is something new, like a soda tax, that has very little history or case law. Where the best we can do is hypotheticals. That’s not the case.
> It's disappointing that we're unable to have a frank discussion of this subject
I find it scary that we’re having a discussion. As I see it the story is ‘FB refuses to comply with 40 year old law’, and there are a lot of people arguing they don’t like the idea behind the law so why should they?
Because it’s a 40 year old law. It’s been to the Supreme Court at least once (2015). You don’t get to choose to ignore it because you don’t like it and then get mad when the government tried to punish you for it.
> All the responses in this thread have essentially been that we shouldn't ask "What next?" because the "next" part hasn't happened yet
FHA was 1968. So 50 years, not 40. We have 50 years of ‘next’ to look at.
> That's just ostrich-in-sand thinking.
What is ignoring 50 years of impact and acting like we don’t know how the law would be enforced?
Again? My read of this story was purely as a ‘tech giant decides to ignore he law because they can get away with it’ and had nothing to do with the law in question.
I should have expected HN to see it as ‘poor company bullied by law that theoretically may be problematic based on someone’s beliefs’. I’ve been here far long enough. I should have known. But I didn’t. I looked at the thread. Sigh.
> We don’t know that. I imagine if that was true it would have been proved clearly in the last 40 years.
I don't think it was possible before today's microtarget-based internet advertising to use demographic correlates to substitute for banned targeting of protected groups. That it's now much more feasible than it's ever been in the past to target protected groups without facially making protected group membership part of the filtering process puts anti-discrimination legislation in a new position. The past 50 years of case law isn't particularly relevant to this new situation: in 1968, it wasn't possible to filter ads based on a suite of seemingly-irrelevant characteristics so as to accurately re-create banned targeting.
There is some precedent (e.g., Griggs) for applying a "disparate impact" standard to anti-discrimination measures. My argument is that this reasoning, if followed rigorously, will essentially prohibit ad targeting altogether, since every meaningful ad targeting criterion will end up targeting different arms of protected groups differently.
I've seen no rebuttal of this point, either from you or from anyone else.
> I don't think it was possible before today's microtarget-based internet advertising to use demographic correlates to substitute for banned targeting of protected groups.
Legal history would prove you wrong. Racist seem to be willing to spend a very large amount of time trying to come up with ways to not have to live next to/rent to certain groups of people. You didn’t need a Pentium 4 to figure out that far fewer black people went to college in the 70s and requiring a college degree would be a pretty good way of filtering them out of your application process.
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.