What to Do When Your App Is Racist

On August 7th of last year, Crain’s ran an article about SketchFactor, an app that was set to launch the next day. It would allow users to report having seen or experienced something “sketchy” in a particular location; these reports would then be geotagged and overlaid on a Google map, creating a sketchiness heat map of a neighborhood or city. The idea was to help urban walkers be more street-smart, but the implications seemed insensitive at best, racist at worst. Allison McGuire, the app’s co-creator, had recently moved from Washington, D.C., to the West Village. Both she and her co-founder, Daniel Herrington, were white and in their twenties. At one point, the Crain’s reporter asked McGuire whether her company “could be vulnerable to criticisms regarding the degree to which race is used to profile a neighborhood.”