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Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

ghettotracker.com

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Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#21

Post by boards2x »

bendoernberg wrote: post #5

Feedback: If your goal was to inspire 100 "what's wrong with tech" articles, you named this perfectly. I would highly recommend changing the name and addressing the problematic aspects of red-lining neighborhoods before you get absolutely hammered by a million bloggers.

Judging by the stock photo here http://ghettotracker.com/about.php (white familiy, in case it'll change in the future), it's quire clear who needs to be afraid, and from whom.

I see Compton, California just added. They should simply geotag by ethnicity and save people the need to subjectively "rate" certain areas?

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#22

Post by veinmelter »

boards2x wrote: post #21
bendoernberg wrote: post #5

Feedback: If your goal was to inspire 100 "what's wrong with tech" articles, you named this perfectly. I would highly recommend changing the name and addressing the problematic aspects of red-lining neighborhoods before you get absolutely hammered by a million bloggers.

Judging by the stock photo here http://ghettotracker.com/about.php (white familiy, in case it'll change in the future), it's quire clear who needs to be afraid, and from whom. I see Compton, California just added. They should simply geotag by ethnicity and save people the need to subjectively "rate" certain areas?

√ √ √ √ √

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#25

Post by 9999 »

ocfx wrote: post #6

I rated Compton just in case...

You mean you arbitrarily placed a dot in the middle of Compton without regard to what's actually there and whether or not it's actually a dangerous block.

Even if you were to ignore the many problems with the very premise of this site (the racially and historically charged name first and foremost) the lack of granularity or verification in reporting would prevent any useful data from being gathered anyway. As other people have said, if you want to know if an area is high risk for crime, you have crime maps, if you want to know what the property values are, you have zillow, if you want to know what the median income of residents is, there's probably a map for that too.

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#26

Post by vinautomatic »

I just thought of the same idea like this the other day. Then I thought maybe Waze/Google would buy it out to make better routes on their maps....

Then since I've lived in both the ghetto-est of ghettos in my lifetime and seen guns drawn at me and etc - it'd be a dream job to drive around and judge the ghetto-ness of a neighborhood. Even make a reality show out of it.

Great minds think alike.

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#27

Post by bendoernberg »

bendoernberg wrote: post #5

Feedback: If your goal was to inspire 100 "what's wrong with tech" articles, you named this perfectly. I would highly recommend changing the name and addressing the problematic aspects of red-lining neighborhoods before you get absolutely hammered by a million bloggers.

FWIW I contacted the developers through the "Contact Us" page and advised them to take the site down before they got creamed, but too late.

EDIT: Ok, actually I think it's either satire or just deliberate provocation, based on the FB page: http://imgur.com/uqKJrW8 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ghetto-Tracker/42731611071296...

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#29

Post by boards2x »

bendoernberg wrote: post #27
bendoernberg wrote: post #5

Feedback: If your goal was to inspire 100 "what's wrong with tech" articles, you named this perfectly. I would highly recommend changing the name and addressing the problematic aspects of red-lining neighborhoods before you get absolutely hammered by a million bloggers.

FWIW I contacted the developers through the "Contact Us" page and advised them to take the site down before they got creamed, but too late. EDIT: Ok, actually I think it's either satire or just deliberate provocation, based on the FB page: http://imgur.com/uqKJrW8 https://www.facebook.com/pages/Ghetto-Tracker/42731611071296...

Good idea. Did the same.

Re: Ghetto Tracker - A rating system to help people avoid the bad parts of town

#30

Post by nilkn »

So maybe some racist white people might rate any area with black or Hispanic people as unsafe. Hopefully, if the area is actually not bad, some non-racist black or Hispanic people will rate it as such. The positive and negative ratings should cancel each other out in such cases.

The areas that end up with negative ratings would have to be rated such by users of all ethnicities, which more or less rules out too strong a correlation with race here.

The only problem is if somehow only a single ethnic group, like white people, uses this.

So, basically, I don't think this is going to be an accurate source of information here. At the same time, if it were to actually get widespread usage, I don't think it would be as bad as some people are making it out to be.

Ultimately, though, why not use something like city-data? The site is ugly as sin but it has basically all the information you could ever want.

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