What’s wrong with ‘Avoid the Ghetto’?

Now here’s some good news to cheer you all up. Microsoft has applied for a patent for a Smartphone ‘app’ (I hate that word) called ‘Avoid the Ghetto’. Basically it just tells you the places to stay away from if you’re in an unfamiliar city. You can imagine the areas it tells you stay from. And so, by logical process, you can imagine the sorts of people who are demanding it never be made, be burned on a pyre and its inventors arrested etc.

Yes, the NAACP was first out of the blocks, describing the device as ‘stereotyping’ and ‘discriminatory’. But the app, so far as I can gather, does not tell people to stay away from all black areas, only most of them. And surely they should stick to their point that high localised crime rates are the consequence of economic deprivation, rather than jumping up and down with fury?