Microsoft Patents Bad Neighborhood Detection

PolygamousRanchKid writes with these lines culled from InformationWeek: "With the grant of their US Patent #8090532 Microsoft may be attempting to corner the market on GPS systems for use by pedestrians, or they may have opened a fertile ground for discrimination lawsuits. ... Described as a patent on pedestrian route production, the patent describes a two-way system of building navigation devices targeted at people who are not in vehicles, but still require the use of such a device to most efficiently route to their destination. ... For example, the user inputs their destination and any constraints or requirements they might have, such as a wheelchair accessible route, types of terrain they are willing to cross, the option of public transportation, and a way point such as the nearest Starbucks on the route. Any previously configured preferences are also considered, such as avoiding neighborhoods that exceed a certain threshold of violent crime statistics (hence the description of this as the 'avoid bad neighborhoods' patent), fastest route, most scenic, etc." Having lived in some high-crime neighborhoods, the actual feature (versus the patent) sounds like a great idea to me.

Comments

Re:Political Correctness?

[couchslug]

Quite right. All crimes with location data should be in a national online database so bad areas can be avoided.

I have a policy when dealing with realtors. It's not AT ALL politically correct, but my safety trumps everything else so I don't pretend to care.

I select realtors of similar demographics to myself, and bluntly inform them I want "no/few fucking neighbors, and none who are poor, and none who don't look like me".

I got what I wanted.

VOLUNTARY segregation is "the right of free association", and I'm all about me so I practice it when making the massive investment of a home. That's no time to bother with principles which are not to your advantage.