'Ghetto Tracker' App Helps Rich Avoid Poor

All cities have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ areas. Talk to locals to get an idea of  where the ‘bad’ areas are located and avoid them especially at night.” That’s  the quote you can find headlining the Ghetto Tracker‘s new  website, Good Part of Town.

According to The  Huffington Post, a new app called Ghetto Tracker changed its name to  Good Part of Town, less than 24 hours after it was unveiled. The app is  described as a service seeking to help people identify safe areas in unfamiliar  cities.

Gawker reports that these unsafe areas aren’t identified based on mugging statistics or  murder rates, but rather are being determined by the site’s users and described  by their prejudices.

The Huffington Post shared that the original launch of the page  featured a white family of four smiling alongside the app’s promise to show  users “which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe.”

PandoDaily described Ghetto Tracker as “the worst website on the Internet.” The author of  the PandoDaily article, David Holmes, said: “It’s  pretty detrimental to society when we reinforce the idea that poor or  crime-heavy areas are places to be categorically avoided or shamed. As if to  assume that every person who lives in an area with comparatively high crime or  poverty is a criminal, or that these areas are devoid of culture or  positivity.”

According to Gawker,  somehow Ghetto Tracker’s creator was surprised by all the negative reponses the  site was receiving and decided to change the name to Good Part of Town after  receiving complaints.

“I can’t be held responsible for the assumptions people may make in regards  to factors like race and income,” read the letter to Gawker. “I’ve seen  comments on blogs and in twitter that are trying to say this is encouraging  racism or social stratification and that was never our intention.” The full  letter sent Gawker can be seen here.

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