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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @11:20PM
Your first observations is correct. And, back in the day when job openenings were either word of mouth, or in print, it was perfectly acceptable to post job openings at the college, especially in the spring. This is different, because the job openings were targeted at a specific demographic - and they weren't visible to anyone outside of that demographic.
I'm not making a statement that this particular use of technology was "good" or "bad". A rifle isn't "good" or "bad", it is only a tool. This technology is also a tool. Remember that, when YOU are the one excluded due to your demographic. Liberal leaning corporations like Google may well exclude you because you are a hetero white male. An employer with ties to big oil may exclude you because you are a leftist activist. An employer with the Military Industrial Complex may exclude you for the same reason - or because you have Arabic ancestry.
That's the whole point of my post. You can be discriminated against for ANY REASON, and what are you going to do about it? Hell, you won't even know about it, so you won't do anything about it.
The technology is there, and the corporations are going to use it.