Oh My!

It appears that what the criminal enterprise formerly known as Facebook™ calls micro-targeting has been ruled discriminatory behavior in a California court.

This is a surprise.  As I have stated on a number of occasions, most of this sort of tech is created to ALLOW discrimination. It is a feature, not a bug.

Facebook has done this in job ads for years, and AirBnb, Uber, and, Lyft are structured to allow would-be hoteliers and hack drivers to discriminate.

In the old economy, hotels and taxis cannot discriminate, and they (sometimes) get caught when they do, but a short term rental host or a driver in an app based ecosystem?

At most, that individual, and not the various app companies will face consequences:

Facebook may have to overhaul its entire ad-targeting system after a California court ruled last month that the platform's practice of routinely targeting ads by age, gender, and other protected categories violates a state anti-discrimination law.

The decision came after a 48-year-old Facebook user, Samantha Liapes, fought for years to prove that Facebook had discriminated against her as an older woman using the platform's ad-targeting system to shop for life insurance policies.

………

This, Liapes alleged, caused harm by preventing her from signing up for deals that "often change and may expire"—deals which she said were disproportionately being advertised on Facebook to younger and/or male audiences. As evidence, Liapes pointed to ads that Facebook did not serve to her—allegedly because advertisers used the platform's Audience Selection and Lookalike Audience tools to exclude her—as an older woman:

Liapes identified a life insurance ad that was only sent to males ages 30 to 49 because the advertiser used the Audience Selection tool. In another instance, a life insurance ad was not shown to her because it was only sent to people ages 25 to 45—based on the advertiser’s use of the Audience Selection tool—and because the advertiser wanted to reach people similar to its customers—based on the advertiser’s use of the Lookalike Audience tool.

"As a result, she had a harder time learning about those products or services," Liapes' complaint alleged.

………

"Construing the complaint liberally and drawing all reasonable inferences in favor of the asserted claims, Liapes has stated an Unruh Civil Rights Act claim," the court ruled. "Facebook qualifies as a business establishment. And it does not dispute women and older people were categorically excluded from receiving various insurance ads—an admitted service of Facebook—on its platform."

This blows an enormous hole in Facebook's business model, perhaps a larger one than when Apple went opt-in on stalker advertising on their iPhones.

Good.