Paul Ciotti: Andrew Marantz seems really pissed at the idea of SketchFactor, which he clearly thinks was almost blatantly racist. Okay fine. He may be right. (I wasn’t able to find it to test it). He’s even mad that the creator had the effrontery to leave the App up even though no one is apparently downloading it. What makes me mad though is that Marantz doesn’t recommend any other Apps to help people unfamiliar with a town avoid “sketchy” (possibly dangerous) neighborhoods. There is a need for an App (or something else) in that kind of situation. What’s his advice for helping people not get hassled or mugged? Or doesn’t he care? I suspect the latter.
…Crain’s ran an article about SketchFactor, an app that was set to launch the next day. It would allow users to report having seen or experienced something “sketchy” in a particular location; these reports would then be geotagged and overlaid on a Google map, creating a sketchiness heat map of a neighborhood or city. The idea was to help urban walkers be more street-smart, but the implications seemed insensitive at best, racist at worst. Allison McGuire, the app’s co-creator, had recently moved from Washington, D.C., to the West Village. Both she and her co-founder, Daniel Herrington, were white and in their twenties. At one point, the Crain’s reporter asked McGuire whether her company “could be vulnerable to criticisms regarding the degree to which race is used to profile a neighborhood.”
