Racist app taken down after Twitter attack

A WEBSITE and app called "Ghetto Tracker" for white people to avoid the "bad" part of town has been hounded off line by Twitter.

Racism

A website and app called "Ghetto Tracker", designed to help people avoid going to the "bad" part of town has been taken down after it was attacked on Twitter for being racist.

Featuring a smiling white family on the home page, Ghetto Tracker purported to be an innocent travel tool for wary tourists wanting to keep out of trouble.

It posed the questions, "Travelling to a new city? Will you be visiting a safe part of town?" and the reassurance, "Ghetto Tracker can help determine which parts of town are safe and which parts are not."

The way the app worked was to allow locals to rate the safety of different parts of a given area.

The site appeared last weekend, and within 24 hours it was causing a stir on Twitter, with tweets from Americans accusing it of playing on people's fears and, Gawker said, being "a racist, classist app for helping the rich to avoid the poor".

Apart from the racist associations of the site's name - a ghetto is traditionally a poor area inhabited by African Americans, people were angry the site appeared to allow anyone to arbitrarily decide which neighbourhoods were good or bad, rather than rely on crime statistics.

"Ghetto tracker" app helps the affluent avoid the poor, draws profit from an endless wellspring of white fear http://t.co/rpdZbyfRiG

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) September 5, 2013

Well @GhettoTracker is one of the more offensive things I've seen on the internet lately. http://t.co/W1ngm9MRp6 ht @WesleyLowery

— Kevin B. Gilnack (@kgilnack) September 3, 2013

Black and white people alike found it "offensive" and "racist", and said it was divisive.

SHUT IT DOWN. RT @WesleyLowery: Friend just passed this along. I have no words for this nonsense: http://t.co/GtQ5TgMMjG

— Saeed Jones (@theferocity) September 3, 2013

http://t.co/p2OlYiQqRp seems like a great way to erase humanity of black communities. Then comes inferior services, displacement, bulldozers

— Miss Claire (@grenadine) September 3, 2013

@GhettoTracker ...NOT by making maps that recreate the racist logic that concentrated poverty in communities of color in the first place

— Miss Claire (@grenadine) September 3, 2013

Apparently responding to the criticism, the site's owner took down the photograph of the all white family, replaced it with a picture of an ethnically diverse family and changed the name from "Ghetto Tracker" to "Good Part of Town".

In addition to the name change, all mention of the word "ghetto" had been removed from the site.

After being attacked on Twitter, the owner of "Ghetto Tracker" changed the site's name to "Good Part of Town and replaced the white family with a black family. Picture: Supplied.

People noticed and began attacking the site again.

@dansinker @erikhinton @palewire Up til 30 min ago it was a static pic of a white family

— THE TACHYON DON (@clint) September 3, 2013

Then under the weight of a further barrage on Twitter, the site disappeared.

Better yet, the awful http://t.co/p2OlYiQqRp and http://t.co/P9Us7u7m4s have been taken down. Damn straight.

— Miss Claire (@grenadine) September 4, 2013

Gawker decided to follow up who had started the site, which it described as "deplorable" and which PandoDaily said was "pretty detrimental to society when we reinforce the idea that poor or crime-heavy areas are places to be categorically avoided or shamed".

In an email sent to Gawker, the app's team claimed it changed the name not in to the racist accusations, but in response to emails from a woman whose family had been contained in an actual World War II ghetto and one from a man who grew up in a struggling area and went on to graduate from college and overcome his upbringing.

"I can't be held responsible for the assumptions people may make in regards to factors like race and income," the email to Gawker said, "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."

Two Twitter sleuths identified the person behind Ghetto tracker as Casey Smith, the president of a Florida-based company called Web Design.

Mr Smith has denied the connection.

An email to Gawker claimed from the (unnamed) creator of the site said Ghetto Tracker "was meant to be something that people would remember. Well, it worked, but unfortunately, it appears to have brought a lot of negative baggage along with it.

"The idea was to make it social, as if you were asking a friend, "Hey, I'm going to be visiting [your city] and thinking of staying at [some hotel], is that a good area?".

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