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Comment by Jackson__ | Hacker News Reader

> These tools can easily be manipulated further to label anyone outside of the white, heteronormative, cisgender conglomerate as a non-person in the eyes of the larger system. All they need is a huge company like Google to “not recognize” a few key factors like whole neighborhoods in redlined areas or a gender marker (as compared to a birth certificate or something).

What a weird rant at the end. Last I checked, there is no gender.google.com, and straight up erasing people from maps for their race/gender/ethics/whatever is not something I have heard of happening.

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FWIW, renaming neighborhoods, including on Google Maps, to erase race and ethnicity is something which does happen.

> Research in Philadelphia by sociologist Jackelyn Hwang shows that gentrification not only shifts the demographics of a given area, but leads to divergent definitions of neighborhoods.

> Minority residents were more likely to call a wide area one neighborhood, named “South Philly.” White residents, by contrast, divided the same area into multiple neighborhoods, such as “Graduate Hospital,” “G-Ho,” “So-So,” “South Rittenhouse,” “South Square” and “Southwest Center City,” splitting up areas by their socioeconomic characteristics and crime levels.

> In such cases, the use of different neighborhood definitions served to legitimize one’s presence in a community. Neighborhoods do this by evoking a sense of place for residents, describing a relationship that the place has with someone’s biography, imagination and personal experiences. The names create boundaries between those who are perceived to belong to these communities – and those who do not.

- https://finance-commerce.com/2019/04/whats-driving-businesse...

I think he's talking about the potential for abuse as opposed to something that's currently happening. I'm trans and even sites where I don't look at queer content at all seem to figure that out. It's not hard to imagine how that could end up being abused.

More likely to break with names than address. Ran into too many headaches trying to get my name right everywhere.

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