In a bid to settle multiple discrimination lawsuits, Facebook says it will no longer allow the targeting of users based on their age, sex or ZIP code for ads related to housing, employment and credit.

The decision by the social media giant to prohibit marketers from selectively advertising to people on its platform follows an earlier move to bar “ethnic-affinity” based marketing following a report by ProPublica.

• The changes apply to advertisers who offer housing, employment and credit offers to U.S.-based users of Facebook, Instagram and Messenger.
• The agreement also will create a separate online portal for housing, credit and employment offers. Those advertisers will not be able to target users in a geographic area smaller than a 15-mile radius, which advocates say tamps down on “digital” neighborhood redlining.
• Facebook said it hopes to implement the requirements by the end of the year.
• Housing, job and credit advertisers will also now only be able to choose from a few hundred interest categories to target consumers, down from several thousand.
• Critics have said such a swath of finely tuned categories, like people interested in wheelchair ramps, are essentially proxies to find and exclude certain groups. Facebook said it will keep more generic interests like “real estate,” “apartment” and “job interview.”
• Facebook has previously said that it was being held to an unreasonably high standard, and that ads excluding users by age and gender were not discriminatory. “We completely reject the allegation that these advertisements are discriminatory,” Vice President of Ads Rob Goldman wrote in a December 2017 post. “Used responsibly, age-based targeting for employment purposes is an accepted industry practice and for good reason: it helps employers recruit and people of all ages find work.”

via ProPublica.org - The sweeping changes come two years after ProPublica’s reporting, which sparked lawsuits and widespread outrage.