Court Finds Website Collected Discriminatory User Information
The days of the Wild West on the Internet are gone and many websites are finding out the hard way that while some concessions are made for the use of websites, the same laws that apply in "real life" also must be respected in cyberspace. Roommates.com appears to be the latest site to come under fire for allegedly violating the law.
The Los Angeles Times reported that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco recently decided in an 8-3 ruling that Roommates.com can be found liable for violations of fair housing laws because the site required users to include their race, gender, sexual orientation and other personal information on their applications in order to match them up with roommates.Lawyers for the Fair Housing Council say that these personal questions could be construed as housing discrimination and has opened the website up to liability.
Just as potential employers and landlords may not ask questions about such things as marital status, race or religion either in writing, by telephone or in person, these questions may not be asked on Internet applications or in e-mail communications either.
In the past, federal law had greatly shielded Internet websites from liability in order to foster an increase in Internet commerce and technology.However, the appeals court in San Francisco has put a dent in the shield with this ruling to the dismay of many defense lawyers and legal analysts.
The case against Roommates.com was brought by the Fair Housing Council in 2003 and was initially dismissed by a federal district court in Los Angeles, but lawyers for the FHC appealed.
Lawyers for Roommates.com argued that because the website operates as an Internet forum that it was immune from anti-discrimination laws.As Techdirt.com explained in a recent article, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Internet service providers and website operators are protected from liability arising from the actions of their users.The court found that because questions on the site such as the ones regarding race, religion, parenthood and marital status were mandatory and not simply voluntarily information provided by users, that the website was not immune from liability under the law because it had created the discriminatory atmosphere for the users by requiring the information.
The appeals court decision seemed to greatly hinge on the fact that Roommates.com required the personal information that could have been used in discriminatory housing practices.Had the information been voluntarily submitted by users in a text field, rather than making the personal disclosures that the site required by using the mouse to choose from drop down menus and check boxes, Roommates.com would have likely not been found liable as the voluntary information provided by users would have been covered by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.
The three judges who dissented in the ruling were opposed to the expansion of liability for websites because it could curb the growth of the Internet.These judges also said that the decision went against five other federal appeals courts' rulings.
Recently a federal appeals court in Chicago heard a similar case regarding the classified ads on the popular Craigslist website.The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago found that Craigslist has immunity from liability under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 and was not liable for housing discrimination as a result of classified ads placed on the site by users.
Roommates.com will go to trial for alleged violations of anti-discrimination laws and a determination will be made as to whether or not the site's method of collecting information and matching users violated fair housing laws.
