Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'? 452
theodp writes "Back in the day, leprosy patients were stigmatized and shunned, quarantined from society in Leper Colonies. Those days may be long gone, but are our mapping, GPS, and social media technologies in effect helping to create modern-day 'Leper Colonies'? The recently-shuttered GhettoTracker.com (born again as Good Part of Town) generated cries of racism by inviting users to rate neighborhoods based on 'which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe'. Calling enough already with the avoid-the-ghetto apps, The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger writes, "this idea toes a touchy line between a utilitarian application of open data and a sly wink toward people who just want to steer clear of 'those kinds of neighborhoods.'" The USPTO has already awarded avoid-crime-ridden-neighborhoods-like-the-plague patents to tech giants Microsoft, IBM, and Google. So, when it comes to navigational apps, where's the line between utility and racism? 'As mobile devices get smarter and more ubiquitous,' writes Svati Kirsten Narula, 'it is tempting to let technology make more and more decisions for us. But doing so will require us to sacrifice one of our favorite assumptions: that these tools are inherently logical and neutral...the motivations driving the algorithms may not match the motivations of those algorithms' users.' Indeed, the Google patent for Storing and Providing Routes proposes to 'remove streets from recommended directions if uploaded route information indicates that travelers seem to avoid the street.' Even faster routes that 'traverse one or more high crime areas,' Google reasons, 'may be less appealing to most travelers'."
Re:Real racism is pre-coloring crime (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know about Kansas City, but in the Baltimore/Washington area, there are very definitely places where crime is a constant threat -- not just in a "boogeyman" sort of way, but in a "both my housemate and my officemate have been robbed at gunpoint and I had a crackhead constantly breaking my car windows to smoke crack in there" sort of way.
Leper colonies aren't "long gone." (Score:5, Informative)
But I have to say, in the many countries where leprosy hasn't gone away, there are still plenty of very real, non-metaphorical leper colonies. I know because I'm an eye surgeon who used to work in Africa, and I've been involved in outreach trips to operate on cataracts in leper colonies. If we hadn't arranged the trips, the people would have had no chance of getting their sight back. Nobody much cares about them.
Find another bloody metaphor.
Re:Are ghettos really that bad? (Score:4, Informative)
I live in Vancouver BC, one of the most expensive places to own or rent a home in North America, and we have social housing. Social housing is affordable because it is on government land and the government can ignore market forces and just charge a rate that reflects the actual cost of building the homes, not the grossly inflated free market costs.
The free market isn't always reasonable. [thethirtiesgrind.com]
Re:no ghettos pre-internet? (Score:5, Informative)
We already get enough pointless 300-post threads with everyone arguing about how they apparently know exactly what happened that day every time there's an article related to the Martin shooting. Nobody's going to change their mind on the subject at this point. No need to try to turn unrelated threads into the same argument.
Re: no ghettos pre-internet? (Score:5, Informative)
The only eye-witness who saw the two of them before Zimmerman shot supported Zimmerman's version of events.
The only eye witness who contradicted Zimmerman's version of events got every relevant fact wrong. She claimed that Zimmerman shot Martin in the back and that there were three shots, neither of which were true.
Unfortunately, most people only heard the very biased fiction spread by Martin's family lawyer and various publicity hounds (i.e. Al Sharpton), and various distorted stories by mainstream media. This included NBC doctoring the Zimmerman phone call to make it sound as though he were spontaneously mentioning Martin's race, and ABC, which showed a badly degraded version of a video of Zimmerman, making it appear that he had no wounds.
Re: no ghettos pre-internet? (Score:3, Informative)
Also, the evidence supports Zimmerman's claim of being jumped. Besides the gunshot wound, Trayvon had no injuries besides bruised knuckles. Is that where we should suppose Zimmerman launched his sneak attack, butting his head into Trayvon's knuckles to bruise them?