TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

My Story: I was served by the Fair Housing Council for a Katrina Volunteer Housing site

Back when Hurricane Katrina decimated New Orleans, I built a quick and dirty site at KatrinaHome.com to let people with space in their homes around the country take in refugees. It was actually pretty cool - it had printable pages designed to be posted on walls at shelters, WAP access, various privacy protection tools, and so on. Four months later, I was served with notice from the Fair Housing Council (of New Orleans). I am Canadian, which I’m not sure they realized at the time, so I didn’t know how to take it.

The problem was that in all of the thousands of listings the site received, some folks specified racial, gender, or demographic “preferences” in the free form comment field - along the lines of single mothers wanting families to host instead of single men. I took the site down, as months after the disaster traffic had dropped to zero anyway, and more importantly, I didn’t want to deal with legal troubles from an altruistic volunteer effort. As it turns out, because the comments of preference were in a free-form comment field, I would have been safe anyway under the DMCA “Safe Harbor” provision - a protection that Roommates.com will not enjoy, according to a ruling today.

Note also that Craigslist was sued as well - case dismissed.

The Fair Housing people are a good intentioned group seeking to stop predjudiced landlords from making unfair decisions. It sounds like they may have a case against Roommates.com who by not understanding the HUD provisions may have crossed a line by enabling discrimination. Think of it as the equivalent to a local newspaper having different classifieds sections for white people seeking white roomates, and so on - not a circumstance that would ever arise. “SWF” declarations in actual classified ads would be Safe Harbored as they are “user submitted” content.

Moral of the story: Know your business and regulatory/legal environment. Being a 2.0 startup doesn’t make you immune. Just because you can offer a feature doesn’t mean you should…