
The Department of Housing and Urban Development has announced that it has charged social media giant Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act. By enabling advertisers to choose who could view their ads, real estate companies could potentially discriminate against users based on race, nationality, religion, color, familial status, sex, and disability. Specifically, HousingWire editor Jessica Guerin mentions that Facebook allowed advertisers to exclude users classified by characteristics, such as parents, non-U.S. citizens, and non-Christian.
According to HUD, Facebook mines extensive user data from its own site and combines this with data collected from other sites, using “machine learning and other prediction techniques” to classify users in order to project their likely response to a specific ad.
In doing so, HUD said the company could create groupings defined by their protected class, assuming this group shared either an interest or disinterest in housing-related ads, and then use this information to enable advertisers to enhance their targeting.
The charges follow a complaint that was filed by the department in August in response to a ProPublica article that revealed Facebook was giving advertisers the ability to exclude certain ethnic groups from seeing ads.
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