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Could Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?
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'."
i've lived in NYC since the early 80's and if you were white you were dumb to go to the south bronx or harlem. especially at night. if your kid passes the gifted and talented test to get into accelerated kindergarten, the crappy schools will have spots open in their G&T classes because parents don't want their kids going there
So how is this actually racism again?
In other news, companies simultaneously invent app than can predict areas of low income!
This is pure human nature. We try to isolate ourselves from anything that could negatively impact our standard of living, thereby reinforcing the things
that could cause it in the first place.
have a higher crime rate and higher risk of $badthing, am I being racist against green people? I don't think so. Maybe when I'm in the good side of town, I see a green person and I greet them normally. I don't hate green people, I just am going to stay out of the part of town where most of them live because I don't want to risk $badthings happening.
Now, if I hate all green people and think they're a lower form of life because of $badthings that happen, then yes I'm being racist. But the distinction between the two cannot be legislated or governed.
There are rough neighborhoods and bars in white neighborhoods that I would not expect women to go near at night in good cities.
Facts are facts.
race have to do with crime-ridden neighborhoods?
What the fuck /. ? Your summary is more racist than the technology you're referring to. Well done.
I value my safety over the feelings of others. Label it however you want, it is better than ending up dead, brain dead, maimed for life, or having my eye sockets reconstructed with titanium plates.
I once asked in several forums about the neighborhoods of a city I was going to move into with my family. I didn't want to fall into bohemian neighborhoods (want rest at night, not party) or ghettos just because I didn't know the place. The answers were all about racism, how beautiful and diverse those places were, how much of a lousy father I was for denying my children such enriching experiences, etc.
I resorted to look around for external signs, such as crowded balconies, abandoned cars, how people dressed, etc.
I think I have the same right to be informed when I look for somewhere to live than when shopping around for stuff that suits my needs as precisely as possible.
How is bypassing neighborhoods with a high crime rate "racism", unless you yourself are saying high crime areas ALWAYS have people of a certain race...
There are criminals of every race. The desire to reduce the probability of crime is not a matter of race, but of common sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So now it's wrong, and even RACIST, to mitigate the risk of my family becoming victims by avoiding areas that have exceptionally high rates of crime?
Being wrong and allegedly racist never felt so good.
I don't get why people are upset about this. If a neighborhood is crime ridden, people avoid it; why shouldn't they? High crime has lots of other negative consequences (outmigration, plummeting real estate values, decrease in tax base, etc.).
I don't see what this has to do with racism. If crime is higher in a neighborhood composed of some racial minority, that's incidental; people don't avoid it because of its racial makeup, they avoid it because of crime, and the correlation with race has other causes.
Furthermore, racial minorities have no reason to live in ghettos these days; if they do, it's by choice or inertia.
High crime is high crime. The areas are what they are. Fuck Jesse Jackson. He's one of the reasons that areas with high black population tend to also have high crime rates.
(This statement has been approved by both my wife and me, who are caramel colored and slightly tan.)
In many places, ghettos are where housing is no less expensive -- it's just paid for by someone else.
If there is actual utility, then by pretty much by definition it's not racist. It's simply a statement of how things are.
How things got that way may be associated with racist problems, and racism concerns might be raised regarding how to change something, but to call the app itself racist is just stupid. Then again, a lot of how the US handles race issues is just stupid, so I suppose that's not unexpected.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
As an analyst, to me it's a question of data cleanliness. Yes, people should be able to look at the facts (i.e., crime rate) and route around a higher risk area if they so choose. Trouble is, there's a partial racial component driving those crime statistics (i.e., minorities more likely to be arrested) which probably inflates the "true" crime rates for those neighborhoods. If people are going to get all bent out of shape, they should do so up-stream. Tackle the issues that inject a racial element to crime statistics and leave the people looking for an objective measure of risk assessment alone - they're only using the best available data to make a decision.
Easier said than done of course...
The word is just used too often, for too many things, that it is ceasing to have any meaning for me, besides "somebody doesn't like something".
This is "racist", that is "racist", the next thing is "racist", he's a "racist", she's a "racist", my car won't start because it's "racist", my program has a memory leak because it's "racist" . . . on, and on, and on . . .
It seems to me to be the hobgoblin of tiny little minds, who can't think of anything else better to say, when they've run out of all other arguments.
For me, now, it is akin to telling someone Jewish that they're cheap, someone German that they're evil because of the Nazis, someone Italian that they're in the Mafia, someone Spanish to leave those poor bulls alone, someone French that they're military cowards, etc, etc, etc . . .
Calling someone or something "racist" . . . is in fact as about as "racist" as you can get these days.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
This article, and the topic reminds me of a quote by Thomas Sowell: "The word 'racism' is like ketchup. It can be put on practically anything - and demanding evidence makes you a 'racist.'"
I find it quite a fair bit telling that the majority of posts currently visible on this article are written by AC's. Even completely non-racist and innocuous posts. To me, that says a lot.
And like another poster below mentioned. Why are people getting so uppity, when the app and it's users are just trying to make the best possible decisions for their own livelihood based on the best/only available data on the matter. If anything, such data would probably be less likely to be racist as it removes peoples' biases and interpretations (assuming the data isn't tainted by the stats, but then you're just opening up a can of worms).
headline should read,
Could Humans Use New Technology Create Modern-Day 'Leper Colonies'?
I love these discussions...how will a new tech affect human society? fun stuff...
But it is an engineering and cultural geography question...not a purely sociological or psychological concept...
Here's what I mean:
Engineering: when new tech is developed, the next problem is getting people to use it. "The last mile" so to speak. It's often a question of scale as well, handling 10^8 users on a system. The internet itself is a good example. Countless articles and TED talks have been given about how the internet affects society, but it is a moot point completely for places that have no internet access.
Most of the current thinking (good and bad) is about having 'universal broadband access'...not any one magic gadget or laptop...even Zuck is in on it with his new initiative....that's really just an IT and T-Com question.
Cultural Geography: It's different than sociology and psychology..soc. and psych. are theoretical quasi-sciences (definitely scientific). Cultural Geography is descriptive more than theoretical.
Psychology will tell you if playing video games changes your reactions to questions on a test.
Sociology will tell you how internet access in school and the home correlate to things like finishing college or going to prison.
Cultural Geography describes what humans do with technology.
I'm not dogmatic about these distictions, these are academic disciplines and there is always wiggle room.
Basically I'm saying that this new GhettoFinder app is nothing more than a potential tool for individual cultural geography.
It does nothing more than give data in a context. After that it is all up to the human.
Thank you Dave Raggett
There is definitely a fine line between utility and racism in this case. How does one overcome cries of racism while still maintaining accurate data? One could of course discount race from the algorithms but I imagine having a user rate a neighborhood as 'safe' or 'not safe' or even 'dangerous' does from a technical point. Of course, the wetware inserting the rating could be using race as a reason for the rating.
There's no fine line; it's a Venn diagram, with significantly overlapping areas. If you're doing anything that involves social profiling, you're not going to avoid cries of racism, as even in this day and age, racial background is a strong indicator of social grouping. Just yesterday the article came out mentioning that people tend to become friends with people who have similar DNA. Race is nothing more than a combination of history and a few chromosomes; it'd be silly to think that sometimes, that might be the similar DNA that causes social clustering (just like sometimes it's other structures).
This said, the whole idea of "safe/dangerous" neighbourhoods is often very subjective, as others have pointed out. Whether you're safe depends more on whether you stand out and whether you understand the local dangers than anything else. Take someone from Orlando and drop them in the middle of Seward, and it's not going to be a very safe place for them. Drop someone from Seward in the middle of Orlando, you'll have similar issues.
So I don't think the article's premise actually holds much water -- we aren't clustering "unclean" people together; people just socialize with people who are like them in some way -- even if that way is only income.
A better method of finding desirable routes might be via social network -- "x proportion of people in this area are within 3 degrees of separation from you on Facebook. Proceed?"
Given that TFA is only using leprosy as a metaphor, I suppose this is, strictly, off-topic.
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.
Aberrations have appeared in my destiny prognostication engine!
The worst thing about living anywhere near a "bad" neighborhood are the endless car break-ins that the authorities can't do jack shit to stop. The Coconut Grove area of Miami, and the adjacent neighborhoods in Coral Gables (where I used to live) are a perfect example. Thanks to both explosive gentrification and the enduring legacy of old-south segregation-era zoning laws, there are plenty of areas where you literally have expensive homes back to back with housing projects that will never go away.
In those areas, you can never have guests come over to see you unless they park elsewhere and take a cab, because YOUR BUILDING's parking garage might have 2 layers of gates & security, but for obvious logistical reasons, the guest parking sits unprotected out in the open. Let me tell you... the only thing that sucks worse than getting your own parked car broken into is having friends come to see you, and getting THEIR OWN car broken into. Or god forbid, your parents' car. If your parents' car gets broken into, you will NEVER be allowed to forget about it. My parents STILL bring it up at least two or three times at family gatherings on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July, and it happened more than a DECADE ago.
Ask anybody who lives in an urban neighborhood what their #1 neurotic fear is, and they'll tell you -- "Friends coming to visit, and getting their car broken into". On the hierarchy of social shame, it pretty much tops the list. From that point forward, you no longer live in a nice, safe, gentrified urban neighborhood. As far as your friends and family are concerned, you live in the 'hood.
The first point is that racists seldom believe that they're being racist. Because that would be irrational and they all have very rational (to them) reasons for believing whatever they believe.
The second point is that you would be basing your opinion upon a visual characteristic when the real reason might be something you cannot see. Such as economics. Bad neighborhoods have low property values. So poor people live in bad neighborhoods. Not because they're bad people but because that is what they can afford.
Maybe. But if you're aware that you're greeting him "normally" then you're probably a racist.
When I see an old Chinese woman walking her poodle on the street I treat her the same as I would any other person who was not ...
Old?
Chinese?
Female?
Poodle-orientated?
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.
Anarchists never rule
Stop leaving valuables in your car and it cuts down on break ins a lot. In bad areas I leave my car unlocked, open the glove box and spill the contents onto the car floor. It looks like it has already been robbed.
We had a terrible problem with car theft. What the police did is set up bait cars. These cars have video to gather evidence, gps, and remote controls to lock and stop the car. The bait car program in Vancouver BC reduced car theft 70% over 5 years..
Real policing can be effective.
Anarchists never rule
Being able to tell the difference between human beings and ghetto trash (of any race and income level) is a vital skill. The difference between calling it racism and calling it street smarts is determined by some linear combination of malice, ignorance, and desire to troll.
Rather it is an example of "confirmation bias".
You can tell the false negatives - the people you thought were "good" turn out to be "bad".
But you have no way to verify the false positives - the people you thought were "bad" are really "good". So you do not believe there were false positives.
The result being that the number of "bad" category characteristics keeps increasing. But each one has a clear example that you can cite. Therefore, it is completely rational. And anyone who does not agree is being irrational (opposing that which is rational).
If all the neighborhoods where green people live have a higher crime rate and higher risk of $badthing, am I being racist against green people? [...] I don't hate green people
If you do nothing about it, yes. Racism is not always an irrational reprehension against green people, it's usually a very utilitarian response to risk and asymmetrical information. If green people have more thieves and crooks among them, it's rational to watch your pockets around them and avoid their services. Not because all greens are crooks, but because by buying from whites reduces your risks.
Being green is a signal you are forced to send regardless of how good your skills are and how honest you are. And once the signaling game starts it becomes a runaway self-fulfilling prophecy:
1. Less greens are hired, they sell less goods etc.
2. The proportion of poverty stricken greens increases, well correlated with crime rates among greens
3. The incentive for whites to discriminate is stronger, reinforcing 1.
This whole cycle is at the core of racial relations. Greens are first socially marginalized, and only then hated for being lazy, violent, uneducated etc. And by avoiding green areas you are doing your share of point 3. There shouldn't be any "neighborhood where green people live, with higher crime rate". You as a citizen, a voter and a man should do something about it, it's not right. If you get on with your life and simply adjust your GPS route to avoid the higher risk, then yes, you are making a racist choice.
It's not racism to avoid someone, and it's not racism to choose someone else. It's only racism if what you're doing hurts, stifles, or restricts the freedoms of someone. I can choose not to buy that house, or not to take those streets, or not to patron that restaurant. It's not racist. It's me having a preference.
So if I don't like greeks, and hence don't want to pay greek owners of a greek restaurant, I don't eat there, and it's not racist. If I picket the restaurant and stop others from going there and ask my political representative to tear down that restaurant, then that's racism.
Greeks have the right to not be hindered by my preferences. They don't have any right to my money. See the difference?
(Incidentally, I love greek food, and recently found two fantastically greek-family restaurants in Oshawa and in Whitby.)
If wandering into a neighborhood means you are likely to get car-jacked or to have your skull caved in and you wallet taken, someone warning you not to go there is doing a service. If the local residents don't like the opprobrium, they can fix the problem. There is no right to behave like an animal and expect others to put up with it.
If I say "avoid crime ridden areas" I am not saying "avoid these races"... That crime ridden areas and given races happen to correlate is a coincidence and not actually something that people are intentionally trying to avoid.
The tendency to label things as racist has really gotten out of control. I think my favorite example of this was a greeting card from Hallmark that had an astronomy theme. It was a verbal greeting card that talked. And part of its little rant included references to "black holes" which is an astronomy term with no racial meaning. Regardless, the NAACP claimed that the cards really said "black hoe"... they didn't... and the NAACP also found the term "black hole" to be inherently racist which of course it isn't.
But this sort of thing happens because we give as a society these advocacy groups license to redefine what racism means to include pretty much anything including very innocent behavior.
If I am in a bad neighborhood is it racist to avoid packs of young men? Not really. What if they're also of some touchy minority race that like to turn everything into a civil rights issue? Doesn't matter. You're not avoiding them because of their race. You're avoiding them because its a pack of young men in a bad neighborhood.
People really need to learn the difference between causal and correlative statistics. Simply because you can show various variables correlating doesn't mean a given variable causes the other variable. Often there are third or fourth variables which themselves caused BOTH or even more correlative variables to all move in the same direction.
For example, why is it that certain races have bad neighborhoods? Does the literal color of their skin cause their crime to be higher? Unlikely. So there are other issues which ACTUALLY cause the crime. NOT the race.
Address those issues and the crime will statistically reduce to national norms. And what's more, once it gets known that the crime has gone down and people are statistically as safe... then suddenly people won't be so inclined to avoid those areas.
It has NOTHING to do with race and is therefore not a racial issue. Race is at most a correlative variable that is otherwise irrelevant to the situation.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Social housing if affordable because we are forced to foot up the bill.
The UK police site (www.police.uk) offers a facility to view the crimes in a neighbourhood. It's got nothing to do with race - just what's happening on the streets. And that appears to be the purpose of these apps; the fact that the commentariat immediately assumes it's got a racial component is a sign of how deeply pathological the American liberal establishment is. Remember: the definition of a conservative is a liberal who's just been mugged. One's almost inclined to suggest that one might want to see a few of them mugged...
That's a pretty dopy comment. People will bust in just to see what's in the car. These are not generally your more polished, professional, or intelligent criminals. When I lived in Memphis, my car was broken into so that they could take three audiocassettes. My car was broken into, and they just got a few quarters from the ashtray. My car was broken into, and they not jackshit, because that was all that was in it. At that point I'd learned to install my own windows. But I just started leaving the car unlocked, and that solved the problem. Periodically, I'd get in and notice stuff was moved around, but no harm done, as there wasn't anything in there to steal because I'd never replaced the radio when it was broken into the first time. Same deal years later in Knoxville TN, which in many neighborhoods has roving addicts just looking for an opportunity, or scam artists going to door to door begging "gas money." The po-po don't care; the charitable rich NIMBYs erect shelters in poor neighborhoods, and it just goes on year after year.
A few years ago, I spent about 9 months working a fairly rural section of Missouri.* I'm white and my supervisor was a very dark-skinned black man. We got to talking about fishing and I casually suggested a few fishing spots in the more remote areas. My supervisor very calmly looked at me and said "You're white. You can go anywhere you like around here. I'm a black man in Missouri. There are just certain places I don't go for my own safety."
If these kinds of app provide data on racially-motivate crimes (anyone out there who uses them to shed more light on this?) it would go a long way to helping minorities avoid areas where they might find themselves in trouble with the law by virtue of not being white. It also might give them a better sense of security going into areas they might not normally frequent.
*The town I worked in had a population of about 4500 and I lived 30 minutes up the road in town of 1500. There was a college town of about 20,000 about 30 minutes east by highway. From the town I worked in it was 2 hours in either direction to a major population center.
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not entirely sure about the universe - Einstein