Once upon a time, people celebrated the Internet as promising a new era where shoppers, invisible on the web, could not be judged based on their race or otherwise discriminated against.  However, online behavioral targeting can combine a home address and a few more characteristics to create an almost perfect proxy for race.  If anything, such online discrimination can be more vicious for its subtlety and invisibility since customers don’t even know what prices are being offered to other people of different races or socioeconomic circumstances.   And it’s not even clear that current laws could fully address such harms if they could be made visible, since as George Mason University professor Rebecca Goldin noted in a 2009 article, what would be the legal status if banks used “the kind of music one buys to determine his or her loan rate?”[i]

Such online “weblining” has been well documented.   Along with the price discrimination based on location discussed above, companies like Wells Fargo listing houses for sale have collected zip codes of online browsers and directed those buyers towards neighborhoods of similar racial makeup.[ii] This online discrimination parallels the broader reality of companies like Wells Fargo illegally steering an estimated 30,000 black and Hispanic borrowers from 2004 to 2009 into more costly subprime mortgages or charging them higher fees than comparable white borrowers.[iii]