The techniques Meta has created to analyze users' races as part of that work will be crucial to the company's ability to vet the existence, or lack thereof, of discrimination in its ads.Ī group of solar development heavyweights has promised to purchase up to $6 billion worth of U.S.-built panels over the course of four years. "Are Black users treated differently than other users? Being able to measure that and be very transparent and forthright about the fact we are measuring that was incredibly important to me,” Austin told Protocol earlier this year. Under Austin's leadership, Meta is undertaking a novel study that will analyze its impact on users of different races. He joined Meta last year after a damning civil rights audit called Facebook out for everything from its failure to police former President Trump's posts to its history of enabling housing discrimination through ads. “This settlement is historic, marking the first time that Meta has agreed to terminate one of its algorithmic targeting tools and modify its delivery algorithms for housing ads in response to a civil rights lawsuit," Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.Īustin himself is a veteran of the DOJ's civil rights division. The company has previously removed certain ad targeting categories from housing, employment and credit related ads and added them to its public ad archive. Meta is also agreeing to do away with functionality called Special Ad Audiences that allows advertisers to target lookalike audiences of users for housing, employment and credit related ads. "Today’s announcement reflects more than a year of collaboration with HUD to develop a novel use of machine learning technology that will work to ensure the age, gender and estimated race or ethnicity of a housing ad’s overall audience matches the age, gender, and estimated race or ethnicity mix of the population eligible to see that ad," Austin wrote in his statement. In the report, Microsoft said that "we’re continuously evaluating how we can best support partners and make Microsoft software available to customers across all environments, including those of other cloud providers.”Īs part of the settlement, Meta is committing to institute what it's calling a “variance reduction system” to ensure that the intended target of an ad and the actual audience to which an ad is delivered align. OVHCloud told the Wall Street Journal that the complaint was filed in conjunction with several other companies, which it did not name. And just last year cloud storage company Nextcloud filed a complaint about the bundling of OneDrive and Windows OS. In 2020 Slack filed a similar complaint alleging that Microsoft wasn't letting other services integrate with Teams, instead capturing market share by bundling it with Office 365. This isn't the first time Microsoft has come under scrutiny for the way it bundles products. “Through abusing its dominant position, Microsoft undermines fair competition and limits consumer choice in the cloud computing services market," OVHCloud told WSJ. The complaint, which was filed with the European Commission, alleges that Microsoft's Azure Cloud is cheaper to use than its competitors because of the way Microsoft licenses its Office products. A French cloud company has filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, according to the Wall Street Journal, targeting the way Microsoft licenses its popular Office software suite.
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