Tag Archives: SketchFactor dot com

New app will keep you away from ‘sketchy’ areas; now considered “racist”

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Smiling White Young Racists, Male and FemaleFirst, check SketchFactor.com.

This is now an “app” created for various smart phones, which was quantified as “SketchFactor — a community empowerment app for anyone, anywhere, at any time.”

Then, with that in mind, consider the facts.  Because facts in and of themselves, these days, seem to be considered racist.

SketchFactor actually deigned to consider bad neighborhoods as bad, as criminally rife, and distinguished between areas of high crime and low crime.

By way of those terribly-racist statistics.

As Gawker.com portrayed:

Launching on Friday, SketchFactor allows users to report on, read about and navigate around potentially unsafe neighborhoods.

Almost every New Yorker has had that moment: finding oneself on a strange block in an unfamiliar neighborhood late in the evening and wondering, “am I in a bad situation?”

Well, now, there’s an app to answer that question.

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 iTunes on Friday, capping off a big week for the startup, which was named as a finalist in NYC BigApps, a city-sponsored competition that promotes technologies designed to improve quality of life issues in New York City and government transparency.

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.

There you go.  Caucasoids being racist once again.

As “racists” — from Gawker.com — a website for the guilty Caucasoids amongst us:

Smiling Young White People Make App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods

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.

Further:

Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined? I ask because the two enterprising white entrepreneurs above just made yet another app for avoiding non-white areas of your town—and it’s really taking off!

But here’s the great kicker:

There’s An App That Shows You Which Neighborhoods Are ‘Sketchy,’ And A News Crew Got Robbed While Using It

In DC — imagine that!

by Alyson Shontell

Oh, the irony.

A Washington D.C. news crew says it was robbed in Petworth, Northwest D.C., while reporting on a controversial app that shows users where “sketchy” neighborhoods. The news crew said the app led them to the location of the shoot.

While the D.C. news crew didn’t specifically name the app they were reporting on, it sounds a lot like SketchFactor, an app that was recently featured in Valleywag, Business Insider and other outlets as an app with a racist connotation. “Smiling Young White People Make An App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods,” Valleywag’s Sam Biddle wrote.

“We were doing a story on an app that describes ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods,” WUSA 9 crew member Mola Lenghi told his network on air Friday evening.

“It led us to the Petworth neighborhood of Northwest, and I’m not going to call it a ‘sketchy’ neighborhood, but as folks were telling us that it was a good neighborhood, and that not much activity happens around there — as that was being told to us, our van was being robbed.”

Lenghi showed the van’s destroyed lock and says a number of electronics and bags were stolen from the vehicle. 

Perhaps I might distill some things down to this:

Statistics, meet Reality.  Shake hands and come out fighting.

BZ

 

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