A minor internet kerfuffle has erupted over the introduction of an app called “Sketch Factor”.  Sketch Factor is a crowd source app where users can upload information they find “sketchy” about their neighborhood or wherever they happen to be.  This is then added to map data and can be used to avoid, or if you’re looking for sketchiness, to find certain neighborhoods.  Some on the internet have declared the app “racist”.  Here’s the logic:

Step 1:  The app was created by two young white people,

Step 2:  All smartphone users are affluent white people,

Step 3:  All white people distrust black people and find them “sketchy”,

Step 4:  Therefore white people will use the app to flag black neighborhoods and black people as “sketchy”.

Step 5:  Racism!

I suppose that my labeling of some neighborhoods as “bad” is confirmation of my “racism”.  I am a firm believer in situational awareness and minimizing risk, and so I would find this app usefull especially if I was in a strange town.  I don’t see at all how that equates to racism.  A lot of the discussion of the app seems centered on Washington, D.C. maybe because the Gawker writer lives there (I think).  Anyway, a Washington D.C. news crew went out to do a story about one of the neighborhoods identified as “sketchy”, and while they were doing man on the street interviews with the residents there something happened:  “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.”    

So…Sketch Factor: 10 out of 10.  I wonder if they reported the incident.  Probably not, that would be racist.