Complaint: Facebook ad tools allow discrimination
Three female job hunters, a large worker coalition and the American Civil Liberties Union lodged a legal complaint against Facebook on Tuesday, accusing the company of enabling discriminatory job postings with its ad targeting tools.
The complaint also targets 10 employers that used Facebook to post job ads — for roles as police officers, truck drivers and sales representatives at a sports store — that were exclusively targeted to men, according to images of ads in the complaint.
The complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the latest of several legal efforts that take aim at Facebook’s core business of targeting advertising to highly tailored groups of consumers, a model that earned the company over $13 billion in revenue last quarter.
The groups bringing the charges, including the 700,000-member Communications Workers of America union, argue that long-standing civil rights laws that protect people from discrimination are being routinely broken as more job and housing searches move online.
“There is no place for discrimination on Facebook; it’s strictly prohibited in our policies,” said Facebook spokesman Andy Stone. “We look forward to defending our practices once we have an opportunity to review the complaint.”
Federal laws prohibit employers, lenders, insurers and landlords from excluding people from advertising on the basis of what are known as “protected categories,” which include gender, race, national origin, religion, age, military status, disability and sexual orientation.
The practice of targeting online ads by demographics has become standard for nearly every Internet company that serves ads. But Facebook — the only tech company named in the suit — is more vulnerable to these accusations because its microtargeting capabilities go beyond those of its rivals and because the social network gives people the option to learn why they are seeing a particular ad.
That “Why am I seeing this?” feature enabled the ACLU lawyers to bring the suit. To conduct the investigation, the ACLU and lawyers from the Washington law firm Outten & Golden had Facebook users indicate that they were interested in looking for a job by conducting searches on various job hunting websites and on the social network. The job ads from the 10 employers named in the complaint popped up in the news feeds of men but not women, the ACLU said. When the men clicked on Facebook’s “Why am I seeing this?” feature, they could see that the ads were targeted to them in part because of their gender.
“Our primary focus is to build the most talented and most dedicated team in the industry, regardless of who those folks might be, so that we can best serve our customers,” Renewal by Andersen, one of the employers who had targeted male construction workers, said in a statement. “We are an equal opportunity employer, and we are proud of the diversity of our workforce.”
In March, fair housing groups filed a lawsuit in federal court in New York arguing that Facebook allowed landlords and real estate companies to illegally tailor their ads to discriminate against protected categories of people. In July, Facebook signed a settlement with the attorney general of Washington state in which the social network
and yacht club on the manmade, sea-horse-shaped Daria Island.
While acknowledging their sales pitch, FireEye warned of the danger such Iranian government-aligned hacking groups pose. Iran is believed to be behind the spread of Shamoon in 2012, which hit Saudi Arabian Oil Co. and Qatari natural gas producer RasGas. The virus deleted hard drives and then displayed a picture of a burning American flag on computer screens. Saudi Aramco ultimately shut down its network and destroyed over 30,000 computers.
A second version of Shamoon raced through Saudi government computers in late 2016, this time making the destroyed computers display a photograph of the body of 3-year-old Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi, who drowned fleeing his country’s civil war.
But Iran first found itself as a victim of a cyberattack. Iran developed its cyber capabilities in 2011 after the Stuxnet computer virus destroyed thousands of centrifuges involved in Iran’s contested nuclear program.
Stuxnet is widely believed to be an American and Israeli creation.
APT33’s emails haven’t been destructive. However, from July 2 through July 29, FireEye saw “a by-factors-of-10 increase” in the number of emails the group sent targeting their clients, Shepherd said. The actual number of attacks likely was even larger as FireEye’s figures only include their own clients.
The emails, pretending to be from a Mideast oil and gas company, targeted organizations in the Mideast, North America and Japan. The recipients included companies involved in the oil and gas industry, utilities, insurance, manufacturing and education, FireEye said.
Several clues lead FireEye to believe APT33 has the backing of Iran’s government. The hackers use Farsi, work an Iranian workweek of Saturday through Wednesday and correspond during Iranian office hours, FireEye said. Its list of targets also includes American firms in petrochemicals and aviation, as well as allied nations, like members of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council, Shepherd said. The GCC encompasses Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.