Words by Alyson Robinson
Ghettotracker.com was taken down from the Internet as quickly as it appeared, after only a few hours of its premier. The ridiculous website which got attention yesterday on Hacker News and PandoDaily, gives users the ins and outs of which neighborhoods or “which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe.”
The website, ran by an unnamed Tallahassee man, seemed to focus on strictly the Caucasian demographic and featured a happy white family on its page. The website’s information was also only based user reviews of different areas.
Its scraping need for credibility was annihilated when it refrained to make reference to factual evidence on the site. No mention was made of murder rates, pedophile maps, mugging statistics or any data justifying the conclusion of the “ghetto percentage” of the community.
It might be the most cynical use of technology since some marketing asphalt tried to turn homeless people into human Wi-Fi hotspots at South by Southwest. –Ebony Magazine
Yesterday afternoon, the GhettoTracker website was relaunched with a change in images, which included African-American and Latino persons.
Did he really think that would leave critics with a better image of his site? Racism and classism are easily identified in this venture.
This afternoon, after typing in GhettoTracker.com, it seems that the website has now been renamed GoodPartofTown.com
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