Discrimination at the Interface: The Equality Act 2010 and Platform Interface Design
Meers, J. (2024), ‘Discrimination at the Interface: The Equality Act 2010 and Platform Interface Design’, The Modern Law Review 87(3) 640-669.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12855
Abstract
Given their dominance in a range of sectors – from private renting to job search – the design of online platforms can impede access to markets and facilitate discrimination. Most legal scholarship on the equality implications of platform design focuses on algorithms. This paper instead interrogates the comparatively neglected issue of interface design. It argues that two areas of interface design – ‘structuring’ and ‘sorting’ functions – fall within the scope of the Equality Act 2010 as a ‘provision, criterion or practice’ that is not protected by a safe harbour. Drawing on web-scraping methods, it then provides an applied example of these arguments using ‘No DSS’ (Department for Social Security) discrimination on a leading rental platform in the UK. Using a sample of 3,336 listings collected years apart, the paper demonstrates how design choices in ‘structuring’ and ‘sorting’ interfaces can either facilitate or minimise discrimination on online platforms.
In a nutshell
Nearly all private renting now begins on a handful of websites, and the way those sites are built determines who gets to find a home. Legal scholarship on discrimination and online platforms has concentrated on algorithms. This paper turns instead to the interface itself, the drop-downs, filters and free-text boxes through which listings are written and searched.
The argument is that two kinds of interface function fall within the Equality Act 2010 as a provision, criterion or practice, with no safe harbour available to the platform. The first structures what a landlord or letting agent is able to say. The second sorts what a prospective tenant is shown.
Web-scraped data from a leading UK rental platform, 3,336 listings collected some years apart, shows what this means in practice. Changing how the listing interface was built changed how much ‘No DSS’ discrimination appeared on the site, which makes design a regulatory question rather than a technical one.
Read the paper
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Suggested citation
Meers, J. (2024), ‘Discrimination at the Interface: The Equality Act 2010 and Platform Interface Design’, The Modern Law Review 87(3) 640-669. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12855