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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @05:59PM   Printer-friendly
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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:39PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:39PM (#614376)

    What's next, discrimination against dummies? If companies want to hire young fools, so be it.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:54PM (3 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:54PM (#614380) Journal

      Discrimination based on anything at all. Facebook has demonstrated that they can discriminate based on criteria that they approve of. The exact same technology can discriminate against Jews, Asians, White, Black, aboriginals, gays, Christians, short people, tall people, fat people, on and on and on it goes.

      What is the single most likely discrimination to be employed by most corporations? Health. If you have health issues, job opportunities are likely to be hidden from you. Unhealthy people need days off, at best. At worst, they cost a lot because insurance is expensive. At the very worst, they cost more, because they die, and there is a life insurance payout.

      If you've posted on Facebook for three years in a row that you caught the flu, you may not see the job opportunities that your neighbor sees. Data miners never forget anything.

      • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:34PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:34PM (#614397)

        There was this one guy with diabetes, pale thin skin, a weak voice, and a weak gait. As soon as I met him, I said to myself "This guy isn't long for this world." and sure enough, he didn't last a year. He was death walking. That wasn't worse than the perfectly healthy wingsuit BASE jumper who turned himself into a red splatter. People die.

        The important thing is bringing value to the company. I don't know about death walking, but the red splatter was really useful.

        ... I suppose I might as well provide info in case anybody wants a job ...

        Southeast USA including: Texas (Austin and San Antonio), Virginia (Arlington and Dulles), Alabama (Huntsville), Florida (beach east of Melbourne), South Carolina (Greenville), Maryland (Annapolis Junction), and possibly others, all on-site. Citizenship is a job requirement.

        We do emulators, JIT, hypervisors, stuff like valgrind, debuggers, manual disassembly, binary static analysis, parsers, and assembly. We write our own low-level tools, frequently in C99 to run on Linux. We also use IDA Pro, qemu, Simics, JTAG debuggers, gdb, Coverity, KlocWork, LLVM, and so on. Easily transferable skills include those related to compilers, kernel drivers, embedded RTOSes, vectorizing, firmware, VxWorks BSP development, symbolic execution, boot loaders, software verification, concolic testing, abstract interpretation, satisfiability (SAT, SMT) solvers, and decompilers. We work with more than a dozen architectures including PowerPC/ppc/POWER, MIPS, ARMv8/Thumb2/AArch64, x86-64/x64/Intel, DSPs, and microcontrollers. We hire from no-degree to PhD. Common degrees include Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics.

        We don't normally work overtime, and we get paid more if we do. We're never expected to take work home or be on call. Because of the citizenship requirement, there is no chance that the work will be outsourced. Flex-time is fairly extreme; some do randomish hours.

        Location hint: Pick Arlington for a car-free life. Pick Florida or Texas to live in a place with no state income tax. Pick Florida for almost no traffic or commute, surfing, and houses that commonly go for $100,000 to $400,000.

        You can email me at users.sf.net, with account name albert.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:33PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:33PM (#614458)

        There have always been job openings for fresh college graduates. How is this any different? So it's ok to have openings for people 1 year out of college, but not 15 years?

        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 26 2017, @11:20PM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 26 2017, @11:20PM (#614491) Journal

          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.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:42PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @06:42PM (#614377)

    Liquidate them so I can get a job before I'm a dotard.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:02PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:02PM (#614383)

    The age targeting us something FB offers, but Verizoff's use of it in employment ads is more problematic. Would it be illegal if they advertised in FinanceBro magazine, knowing that only 25 to 40 year old finance bros read it?

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:17PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @07:17PM (#614390)

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:14PM (#614407)

      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.

  • (Score: 1) by Sulla on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:41PM (2 children)

    by Sulla (5173) on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:41PM (#614428) Journal

    Is this any different than a company running ads on college campuses? Age discrimination would be refusing applicants who don't match their criteria, running advertisements for specific groups is just trying to attract that group to the job posting

    --
    Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:02PM (#614440)

      If the candidates they aren't interested in still had a means of seeing the ad, i.e. it is not expressly hidden from them, then there would be no difference. But good luck trying to see something on the FB that you're not supposed to see...
      So yes, this is discrimination!

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:58PM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @02:58PM (#614747) Journal

      Is this any different than a company running ads on college campuses? Age discrimination would be refusing applicants who don't match their criteria, running advertisements for specific groups is just trying to attract that group to the job posting

      It's completely different. Posting on college campuses *does* certainly limit who sees the posting, but it's not a hard restriction and it's based on the requirements of the job. Neither of those are true of an age-based Facebook ad.

      So, first of all if you post on a campus you're probably posting an entry level job that requires some degree. If you want someone with ten years of industry experience you won't get it that way. You want recent graduates because the job requires that degree, so you post to people who are about to graduate. That's just logical. Education and experience are not protected classes, you're allowed to discriminate on those. And that's what posting on a college campus is actually targeting. It does kinda create an age expectation, but that's merely a side effect. There *will* be older people seeing those ads; not every college student is some 20 year old kid.

      Secondly, if you post on a bulletin board at a college, that's generally going to be a public posting. If you post an ad on the bulletin board at Starbucks, you'll only get applicants who shop at Starbucks, but that's not discrimination because anybody can walk in there. Same goes for college campuses. When I was in school I was part of the student Amateur Radio Club, and about half of our members weren't students, they were community members (most still had some kind of university affiliation, professors or service workers or something, but not students at least.) So all those people would walk through the engineering buildings every time we had a meeting, and would have seen any public posting there as well. Even the mailing lists are usually pretty open, I graduated in 2012 and I *still* occasionally get mail from some student club listservs. The university regulations specifically mandated that outside community members were allowed to join student clubs and mailing lists, so there's nothing stopping any guy off the street from walking in and joining those.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:51PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @08:51PM (#614433)

    Companies discriminate this way because they can substantially narrow the demographics for a position and still find plenty of qualified candidates. Facebook, Verizon, and so forth wouldn't do this if they had a hell of a time finding qualified employees at prices they're willing to pay.

    I don't know how to fix it. But my dad's one of the ones affected. He's 65 but doesn't have enough money socked away to retire. He's in good health, applied to over a thousand jobs in the past year while he works the minimum wage job he has now, college educated, willing to relocate anywhere in the continental US, can't find anybody that returns his calls.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 26 2017, @09:07PM (#614443)

      No, the problem is the Myth of the Rockstar Developer. People outside of a certain age group (or demographic, to make it more generic) certainly aren't "Rockstar Developers" anymore and never will be. We only want these rockstars to work for us because we are rockstars too, and we only mingle with our own! If you can't tell me the Big-O notation in 2 seconds flat of the algorithm I just wrote down, then you're definitely not the 'right kind'.
      Silicon Valley (and this type of company in general) is a very incestuous environment: you see your own, hear your own, you hang out with your own, you eat with your own, you fuck with your own! Welcome to the Bubble, where the bubble may be made of glass but everyone is looking inward only.

    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:36PM (1 child)

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @04:36PM (#614775) Journal

      Eh...I agree in general regarding supply vs demand for labor, but I'm not sure that's the only factor at play here.

      If you're advertising on Facebook, expanding that demographic costs money. So they won't do it unless they expect it to result in more responses. How many people over 40 are applying to jobs through Facebook? I'd imagine if they wanted to expand their reach they'd be better spending that money on Monster, Dice, LinkedIn, or other such sites rather than just a Facebook ad.

      If they've got the ad posted on a public site or a popular job search site, and that ad doesn't specify any age restrictions, then I don't think it's discriminatory if they want to advertise that posting to specific demographics. On the other hand, if the only way to find the job is through the ads they purchase, then those ads need to be purchased in a way that is not discriminatory. IMO, all they'd need to do to avoid being discriminatory is to post the job somewhere like Monster, then buy ads linking to the Monster post. That way they can spend money advertising the post where that money will be most effective, but anyone else can still easily apply if they're looking.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:53PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 28 2017, @05:53PM (#615182)

        To be clear, I'm not advocating that we just throw more laws and regulations at the problem. I'm not sure what the solution is.

        But I think your point still doesn't hold. Say a specific job opening has 500 potentially qualified applicants aged 40 or younger in an area and 250 potentially qualified applicants aged 41 or older. Even if the company uses your strategy - a job listing at Monster.com or Indeed.com and then buying ads for people under 40 at Facebook - they're going to have a lot more exposure to younger candidates. So instead of getting, say, 50 younger candidates and 25 older candidates they might get 50 and 12. The odds that an older person suited to the position gets into the interview process are lower. The individual solution "older people have to be more diligent in their job search" will help some, but it won't offset the general trend that favors youth.

        I'm a software developer in my 40s, and I love my work. But I'm thinking of transitioning into some other field when my kids finish college. I won't have enough saved to retire, so I'll need another ten or fifteen years of work. Old teachers or old nurses are commonplace. But as a software engineer, there's a massive gap between "I enjoy learning new things even though my hair is grey" and "Convincing a potential employer I enjoy learning new things even though my hair is grey".

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by meustrus on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:45AM

    by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday December 27 2017, @12:45AM (#614522)

    This really just exposes the fundamental problem with targeted ads. Targeted ads are discriminatory ads. Can you imagine if we had this tech in 1900? You’d have agencies targeting every minor race based on stereotypes. Doesn’t matter that it wouldn’t be the most effective strategy; they’d do it anyway, and society at large would suffer from the invisible divisions. The “melting pot” would never have existed.

    Facebook exposes the problem by (stupidly) giving advertisers the knobs to turn. But it isn’t much better when the Google AI makes these choices behind the scenes. That’s likely to reinforce the status quo, which puts constitutionally protected groups in statistically significantly different demographics for marketing. And if it ran a recruitment ad based on feedback showing whether the recipient was actually hired, you’d likely see the same agist (and racist, and sexist one way or another) result due to the unconscious biases of the hiring manager.

    This ought to be enough to make the entire practice illegal. But more likely, Congress will simply ignore it until the courts are forced to concoct a sketchy framework based on the Civil Rights Act that makes it impractical for all but the most powerful entrenched platforms.

    --
    If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
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