Roommates.com could face discrimination charges

reported in Online Media Daily, April 7, 2008

Web publishers beware, a judge in California has ruled that the roommate matching site Roommates.com could be sued based on their matching preferences which include race, sexual preference, whether the person has children or other aspects that are unlawful.

Roommates.com's position was that the Communications Decency Act immunized it from discrimination lawsuits based on user comments, but the 9th Circuit ruled that the roommate-matching site couldn't rely on that statute because it actively solicited allegedly unlawful information as part of the matching process.

The case stemmed from a lawsuit by the Fair Housing Councils of San Diego and the San Fernando Valley, Calif. They charged that the site was breaking the law by matching up roommates based on factors like their race or whether they had children.

A lawsuit accusing listings site Craigslist with violating fair housing laws was recently dismissed by another appellate court, the 7th Circuit, but that case had a crucial difference: Craigslist didn't structure questions in a way that elicited the objectionable criteria. Instead, users decided on their own to write ads that expressed racial or religious preferences.

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