Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods

[kpete]

Crain's reports on SketchFactor, a racist app made for avoiding "sketchy" neighborhoods, which is the term young white people use to describe places where they don't feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire:

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SketchFactor, the brainchild of co-founders Allison McGuire and Daniel Herrington, is a Manhattan-based navigation app that crowdsources user experiences along with publicly available data to rate the relative "sketchiness" of certain areas in major cities. The app will launch on the iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in the NYC BigApps competition.

According to Ms. McGuire, a Los Angeles native who lives in the West Village, the impetus behind SketchFactor was her experience as a young woman navigating the streets of Washington, D.C., where she worked at a nonprofit.

MORE:
http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20140807/TECHNOLOGY/140809904/new-app-will-keep-you-away-from-sketchy-areas
http://valleywag.gawker.com/smiling-young-white-people-make-app-for-avoiding-black-1617775138/+sambiddle

[dembotoz]

1. wonder if you could hijack the thing to make places like liberty university sketchy

[nomorenomore08]

2. "Places where they don't feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire."

[Rapillion]

3. I thought this was from the Onion

In my neighborhood, these two would be "sketchy." What nonsense.

[Marie Marie]

4. Did they include Wall Street on their app?

Certainly a high density of criminals can be found there.

[Throd]

5. Is it based on raw crime statistics or racial demographics?

The first could be legitimate, the second one would just be racist.