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Internet Mapping Glitch Turned a Random Kansas Farm Into a Digital Hell (fusion.net)
An anonymous reader writes: Back in 2002, a company called MaxMind had an idea: Gather up as many unique computer or smartphone IP addresses as they can, match them to a map, and sell that data to advertisers. The problem is that MaxMind's tech has made life miserable for a handful of homes across the US -- especially one otherwise unnoteworthy northern Kansas farm. The farm's 82-year-old owner, Joyce Taylor, and her tenants have been subject to numerous FBI visits, IRS collectors, ambulances, threats, and the release of private information online. They've found people rummaging in the farm's barn and one person even left a broken toilet for some reason. People would even post her details online and encourage others to get in on the harassment, she said. The local sheriff even had to put a sign on her driveway, telling trespassers to stay away and contact him first if there are any questions. What's her mistake? MaxMind thought that if its tech couldn't tell where, exactly, in the United States, an IP address was located, it would instead return a default set of coordinates very near the geographic center of the country -- coordinates that happen to coincide with Taylor's front yard. The abuse began in 2011. A quick online search for the farm's address brings up pages of forum posts reporting the "scam farm."
The glitch is in your brains for geolocating anything deeper than the local ISP's router.
"“Until you reached out to us, we were unaware that there were issues with how we selected these lat/lons,”"
Bullshit.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Developers: If we can't resolve the IP lets just give it a default center of the US coordinate, instead of returning a 'could not resolve location'
Project Manager: Sounds good to me!
Later...
A moron sysadmin: I'm getting tons of inbound spam traffic coming from this farmhouse in the middle of Kansas that has curiously rounded coordinates! They must be the culprit, clearly this IP GIS lookup has 5 digits of precision on lat/long!
Lots of stupidity to go around here
This most assuredly was not a "glitch".
It was a deliberate design decision on the part of the mapping company to portray the returned data as more accurate than it was. The reason this Kansas farm became a "digital hell" is because the company decided to use a defined point (which happened to be their front yard) to represent "USA, not otherwise specified". (Reason being that it was close to the center of the continental USA.) Similar types of approaches were taken for other entities. (IP addresses in Georgia that didn't have further county/city information got put at the geographic center of Georgia, etc.)
That's not a "glitch" - that's a bone-headed design decision. A fundamental rule of data processing is that you shouldn't represent invalid values (or values with lowered precision) with valid values -- for this very reason. If you have invalid values and valid values which can both be the same value, if you get that value back, you don't know if it's valid or invalid. Sure, pick some value to represent "Somewhere in the USA, but no further information", but make sure it can't be confused with any valid value. Make sure it's incredibly obvious that the value isn't valid just from looking at it.
If you can't do this (if all values of the variable might be valid), you have to use out-of-band information to specify things. e.g. Having an extra data field to specify the level of precision (country, state, county, city, block, etc.). "38N 97W" is much different from "38N 97W, plus or minus 1500 miles".
I used to build/maintain software that predicted Flooding risk for potential home loans as part of the pre-funding process.
Long story short, one of the vendors of data we used did a stupid trick like this. If they couldn't find the address, it returned a "zip centroid" (middle of the zip code), And if the entire zipcode had no flooding risk, it would go ahead and "clear" the property. The problem was when it got worse than a Zip code match, it would think it got a zip centroid match in the middle of Kansas (probably this lady's farm actually!)... clearing the property of flood risk.
It was the vendor's mistake and they would have been liable, but it was BS and easy to detect once I ran some statistical analysis on it.
It really screwed with people's lives though... they get a home loan knowing they won't need to pay 2-4 grand a year in flood insurance, then once we audited the vendor data, or their home finally showed up on a map, they would be required to get insurance.