Business
Racist app taken down after Twitter Outrage
Racist? Ghetto Tracker allowed users to rate an area’s safety. Using those ratings, the site would dub the poorly rated neighborhoods ‘GHETTO’ in bold red
A good idea executed in a terribly controversial way. That was the consensus throughout Twitter about the new the app “Ghetto Tracker”; an app that allows people to determine which areas of a city are safe, and which areas should probably be avoided.
But the name itself, which many people found racist, and the fact that the app’s website featured a picture of a white family, weren’t the only complaints made about this app. The app also failed to use any sort of statistics and instead seemed to arbitrarily decide whether neighborhoods were safe or unsafe. Twitter exploded with comments about how the app was designed to help affluent white people stay away from poor black people.
After receiving the criticism, the creators of “Ghetto Tracker” not only changed the name of the app to “Good Part of Town” and removed any reference to ghettos from their website, but they also changed the picture. Now instead of a happy, white family of four, the website featured a picture of a black couple reading to their child. They argued however, that the changes had nothing to do with the public’s reaction and took no responsibility for people making any sort of link between the app and race or income.
Even these changes couldn’t save the app though. People continued to express their outrage and the app was eventually taken down.
While the CEO of the Ghetto Tracker / Good Part of Town has yet to identify him or herself,
they have since written a lengthy letter explaining their position to Gawker, which partly reads: “Hi Nitasha, As you may have noticed, we’ve changed the name of the website because it was detracting from the serious purpose the site was meant to serve, which is to help people who are unfamiliar with a particular area to stay safe. I am the creator of the site and I haven’t worked on anything like this in the past. I’d rather not have my name published since some people have given borderline threatening responses to the site. I am 30 something and based in Tallahassee, Florida. This was originally seriously developed as a travel tool and the name “Ghetto Tracker” was meant to be something that people would remember. Well, it worked, but unfortunately, it appears to have brought a lot of negative baggage along with it… – See
(source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/technology/racist-app-taken-down-after-twitter-attack/story-fni0byx2-1226712643772)
