Roommates.com can be sued

This ruling could have far reaching and unintended consequences. It will be interesting to watch this play out.

I hope everyone has a compelling weekend be it planned or spontaneous. M

Roommates.com can be sued for violating fair housing laws, court rules

The website requires users to provide information, including their race and sexual orientation, which could foster housing discrimination.

The law may temper the freewheeling nature of the Internet after all.

The
9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided Thursday that a website may
be found liable for violating fair housing laws by matching roommates
according to gender, sexual orientation and parenthood.

Federal
law protecting websites “was not meant to create a lawless, no-man’s
land on the Internet,” the court in San Francisco said in an 8-3
ruling.

The judges said a site called Roommates.com may be brought to trial for
possibly violating anti-discrimination laws because it requires users
to provide information about gender, sexual orientation and whether
they have children, and then uses the information to screen people for
matches. [L.A. Times Article]

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