Incident 93: HUD charges Facebook with enabling housing discrimination

Description: In March 2019 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing real estate sellers to target advertisements in a discriminatory manner.

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Incident Stats

Incident ID
93
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2018-08-13
Editors
Sean McGregor, Khoa Lam

CSET Taxonomy Classifications

Taxonomy Details

Full Description

In March 2019, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act. HUD claims the platform’s ad-targeting options enabled advertisers to illegally restrict the housing options presented to marginalized groups. In a similar case brought by a group of civil rights groups, Facebook reached a settlement and agreed to several changes to their platform. Real estate sellers can no longer target ads by age, gender or zip code and Facebook created a housing portal that allows users to view all available house listings. HUD alleges that, despite these changes, Facebook’s AI and machine learning tools create proxy classifications that continue to enable advertisers to discriminate against protected groups.

Short Description

In March 2019 the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development charged Facebook with violating the Fair Housing Act by allowing real estate sellers to target advertisements in a discriminatory manner.

Severity

Moderate

Harm Distribution Basis

Race, Age, Sex

Harm Type

Harm to civil liberties

AI System Description

Facebook's algorithms which provide user classifications to advertisers to enable ad targeting.

System Developer

Facebook

Sector of Deployment

Arts, entertainment and recreation

Relevant AI functions

Cognition

AI Techniques

machine learning

AI Applications

data analytics, classification

Location

United States

Named Entities

Facebook, Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, National Fair Housing Alliance, Ben Carson, American Civil Liberties Union

Technology Purveyor

Facebook

Beginning Date

2019-03-01T08:00:00.000Z

Near Miss

Harm caused

Intent

Accident

Lives Lost

No

Laws Implicated

Fair Housing Act

Data Inputs

user Facebook activity, user social network data

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.