I have mixed feelings about donteat.at (foursquare + health inspections). I’ve been wanting to scrape and clean up Boston’s restaurant inspection database (“The Mayor’s Food Court”) but I’m really worried that the resulting data would be used in this way: telling people not to eat there. I’m very concerned about decision apps and the “umbrellatoday-ification” of data.

Obviously there are some underlying values here (for example, some of my favorite, locally owned restaurants are frequently cited) but there is ample room for discussion on ethical uses of data (and their consequences).

(I had another person excitedly talk about using bike crash data for routing last week too, which is where all this anxiety probably stems from)