Facebook will exclude its ad-targeting options that are based on people’s ethnicity, beliefs, political views, and other information that can be sensitive and personal. This will hinder advertisers to post any discriminatory ads. It also means that more than 5,000 ad-targeting options will be taken out by the social site. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) accused Facebook is breaking the law by letting the proprietors discriminate the potential renters and buyers using its ad-targeting options. HUD objected on how Facebook advertisers were able to target the viewers based on the advertiser’s preferred religion, nationalities, race and gender.

Facebook said that “While these options have been used in legitimate ways to reach people interested in a certain product or service, we think minimizing the risk of abuse is more important.” Facebook required compliance certification to all its U.S advertisers to certify that they accepted its anti-discrimination policy. According to the social site, this is also to educate them “the difference between acceptable ad targeting and ad discrimination”. The social network planned to widen the system of its non-discriminatory policy to more countries but the timeline was not mentioned.