By Joe Silver, Washington Legislative Office, ACLU

Leaks of classified and highly secretive information from U.S. government databases by the likes of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have naturally garnered massive press attention, exposing some deeply problematic U.S. military and national security programs and activities. Meanwhile, however, a lesser-publicized phenomenon has also been occuring with some frequency recently: breaches of corporate databases holding highly sensitive information on millions of Americans.

Last month, a web-based service called “Ghetto Tracker” was unveiled. The site’s creator touted it as a travel advice service where users could pin digital maps with safety ratings to enable those new to town to avoid dodgy neighborhoods. While crowd-sourced travel advice is not a particularly novel or noteworthy idea, the site’s suggestive use of the word ghetto to evoke neighborhoods of color and its intention to label certain areas categorically “good/bad,” “safe/unsafe,” in conjunction with its choice of the below stock photo on the homepage, has resulted in an understandable backlash from those who have found the service distasteful. After a storm of negative publicity, the operators quickly renamed the service “Good Part of Town,” the stock photo was replaced with one depicting a black family, and the site dropped all of the references to “ghetto” to refer to a “bad” area. Despite this rebranding effort, the site’s operators decided to take down the site altogether just days after the launch.