[ajross]

> What they're saying is that even if you target people who write "I love programming" on their fb page, it's still discriminatory

That is... not what they're saying. In fact the article doesn't claim to know the targetting mechanism at all (though it turns out that they found a way for some advertisements to circumvent the new restrictions on gender and race targetting). They're just claiming to have found ads that empirically are targetting demographics in ways that Facebook has already agreed not to.

The "I love programming" bit seems to be something you've invented.

[cm2012]

"Dolese’s ad, for example, could have reached a predominantly male audience because it featured a man, or because an interest in trucking acts as a proxy for maleness, or both. (A Dolese spokeswoman said the ad targeted categories “that would appeal to someone in this line of work.”) The settlement did not resolve the potential bias from proxies and ad content, but said Facebook would study the issue."

The "I love programming" bit is an example of the kind of proxy they're talking about. Something correlated with gender but not gender itself. The FB algorithm uses thousands of data points that might correlate in different ways. Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be forbidden is crazy.

[ajross]

> Saying that any of those variables that correlates with gender should be forbidden is crazy.

Once again, they are not saying that. You have applied a maximalist interpretation to the article that simply isn't present in the text.

The point of the article is that the end result is still discriminatory, something that Facebook had promised to fix. And they didn't fix it, and that's newsworthy.

Your point seems to be that solving the problem is really hard, so we shouldn't try to solve it, nor talk about whether or not it's being solved by parties who have promised to try to solve it?