If redlining is illegal in the real world, why isn’t it illegal online?
A lawsuit filed by US citizen and dismissed by a Washington DC court could create a very interesting civil rights question: what right does a company have to deprive me, based on certain characteristics such as my age, my race or other variables, from seeing certain advertising?
The question, posed in a world where we all want to see as little advertising as possible, at first seems a joke. But in practice, the question is conceptually identical to redlining, the systematic denial of various services by federal government agencies, local governments and the private sector, either directly or through selective price increases, to certain groups or residents of specific neighborhoods.
Digital redlining creates or perpetuates the inequalities derived from the selection of groups based on certain socio-demographic or other variables. The complainant, a woman in her mid-fifties, claimed that the targeting used by a company on Facebook prevented her from seeing certain advertisements that would have given her access to lower rental properties, which de facto constitutes discriminatory treatment.
The case touches on recent EU legislation: practices that are illegal in the real world, must also be illegal online, and highlights practices by Facebook that have gone unquestioned…
