
Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race - tambourine_man
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race
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hairy_man674
Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right? So,
the article lead should be ammended from:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other
“ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

To this:

"Facebook’s system allows advertisers to exclude _white_ , black, Hispanic,
and other “ethnic affinities” from seeing ads."

This is a good example of lying by omission. Ethically, there is nothing wrong
with this system if the exclusion can be applied equally to any ethnic group.

And besides, we need this for practical reasons: there are special creams for
people of certain pigments that won't work for my vanilla face...

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tambourine_man
> Caucasians are a category that can be selected from that list too, right?

Not according to Gruber[1]:

 _UPDATE: Their filter lets you screen out Asian-Americans, African-Americans,
and Hispanics, but it doesn’t let you screen out white people? How did anyone
at Facebook think this was a good idea?_

[1][https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-
advertisers...](https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-
exclude-users-by-race)

~~~
hairy_man674
I don't use FB (privacy concerns and commercialization of human beings) so
give the interested source benefit of the doubt.

So FB has made an oversight. The engineers and designers should do the
politically correct thing here and add white people as a category. Most
importantly, the special creams advertisers...

~~~
acjohnson55
That doesn't really solve the problem of them explicitly creating a platform
for discriminatory advertising.

This is also the sort of thing where I have to ask, how many people of color
were apart of the design and implementation of this functionality?

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amelius
Discrimination does not only apply to race. So even if they didn't exclude
users by race, but, say, by profession, then it would still be discrimination.
In fact, most of what "big data applied to personal data" does amounts to
discrimination.

~~~
paulddraper
Discrimination seems to always have a negative tone nowadays, but in some
contexts it is a virtue. E.g. "he has discriminating tastes". I hope any AI I
make is discriminating.

For better or worse, what we accept depends on the situation. For example,
health insurance discriminates on gender, race, and age, all of which are
illegal to discriminate on in employment matters.

Personally, I find advertising to be in the "okay" category for racial
discrimination. Advertisers essentially pay for Facebook users' data (which is
why Facebook is free as in beer), and use that data to target ads. For
example, some cosmetic lines cater to dark skin, and racial discrimination
keeps their ads relevant.

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omarforgotpwd
This is most likely illegal. Facebook will have to get rid of it to avoid bad
PR, if nothing else. If Facebook doesn't move fast to contain this story I
could see it becoming a big deal in the press.

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angry-hacker
Older discussion, but from arstech:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818002](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12818002)

