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from the legal-as-long-as-you-don't-get-caught dept.
A few weeks ago, Verizon placed an ad on Facebook to recruit applicants for a unit focused on financial planning and analysis. The ad showed a smiling, millennial-aged woman seated at a computer and promised that new hires could look forward to a rewarding career in which they would be "more than just a number."
Some relevant numbers were not immediately evident. The promotion was set to run on the Facebook feeds of users 25 to 36 years old who lived in the nation's capital, or had recently visited there, and had demonstrated an interest in finance. For a vast majority of the hundreds of millions of people who check Facebook every day, the ad did not exist.
ProPublica's joint investigation with The New York Times turned up instances where Verizon, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, Target, and Facebook placed recruitment ads "limited to particular age groups", and wrote that "using the system to expose job opportunities only to certain age groups has raised concerns about fairness to older workers".
The Communications Workers of America union agreed: it filed a federal court class action lawsuit (PDF) in San Francisco claiming age discrimination on Wednesday.
[...] Some companies, including Target, State Farm and UPS, defended their targeting as a part of a broader recruitment strategy that reached candidates of all ages. The group of companies making this case included Facebook itself, which ran career ads on its own platform...
In its response, Facebook defended its own age-targeted recruitment advertisements as part of "broader-based recruitment efforts designed to reach all ages and all backgrounds". It added: "We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory."
Facebook wasn't the only platform found with age-targeting: Google and LinkedIn were also pinged in the investigation. LinkedIn changed its system to exclude age, Google did not.
Also reported on The Register
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:17PM (1 child)
All hail the Holy Algorithm. The Algorithm has decided who we should be interested in hiring. Do not question the Algorithm! Also, don't look at the Algorithm, it will burn your eyes!
This most certainly is not discrimination. If we had put "if you're older than 30, we are not interested in you", /then/ of course it would be discrimination, but we didn't put that there so it's definitely not discrimination!(*)
For fuck's sake, more and more, software is becoming plain hostile to humans.
There is something to be said for job ads appearing in -for instance- magazines targeted at very specific age-groups. After all, that *would* be equivalent to this, but there is one big difference: when that is the ONLY place you advertise said jobs, THEN it most certainly is discrimination. And with FB gobbling up more and more of what the "Internet" means to people & effectively becoming the Internet to them, I think there is a solid case to be made for this being a discrimination case! I mean, you'd have to find a pretty disconnected-from-reality-judge who wouldn't see that Teen magazines are not read by professionals in their 40's or 50's - but then again, this is the US of A so who knows, it may be easier done than said...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:14PM
Software isn't becoming hostile to humans. Hostile assholes are just adding it to their arsenal. Their primary tool has always been the willingness to fuck you over for a cut of the take. After that, it's all just tools for the job.
Just because someone is a hostile asshole doesn't mean they can't figure out programming - or pay otherwise half-decent people enough to hold their noses while programming.