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Kansas Couple Sues IP Mapping Firm For Turning Their Life Into a 'Digital Hell' (arstechnica.com)
Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen "countless" law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. We covered this story on Slashdot a few months ago. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm. ArsTechnica adds:In their lawsuit filed against MaxMind, the IP mapping firm, the Arnolds allege: "The following events appeared to originate at the residence and brought trespassers and/or law enforcement to the plaintiffs' home at all hours of the night and day: stolen cars, fraud related to tax returns and bitcoin, stolen credit cards, suicide calls, private investigators, stolen social media accounts, fund raising events, and numerous other events." James Arnold has even been "reported as holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films."
This isn't no record. It is "somewhere in the United States". Personally, I like there idea of not putting a bunch of significant digits on the center. Also, I check three IP addresses (my work, my home and an old home). All where significantly wrong. Anyone using this data base as if it was accurate is clearly an idiot. BTW, it said the error on my location was "5". No units. Two were off by about a mile (which in a city is huge) and the other listed the center of the downtown unit for where I work, so it was off even worse. These people should be suing the sheriff who keeps showing up even though he knows it is bogus.
It's not even remotely a "rounding error".
According to the TFA, the geographic center of the US is located at (39.8333333,-98.585522). In 2002, MaxMind "decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38N 97W or 38.0000,-97.0000" - an arbitrary decision that, given the values picked, is pretty much the opposite of a rounding error.
(Sorry for the lack of degree and minute symbols, but blame Slashdot for that)
#DeleteChrome
Null means null, and a location means a location. There's no point returning null as actual data is known, in this case the USA.
As was covered previously the system that returns the data also returns the accuracy of that data. It was ultimately the end users of the database who decided to implement a simple GPS co-ordinate without the associated accuracy data. Why trash the database is programmers are too stupid to use it?
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Why? That's a location off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, which means that it doesn't even have the benefit of being useful for identifying the correct country, which is what the software is currently configured to do.
The real problem is that they're providing a point in these conditions in the first place. They shouldn't be. Instead, they should be providing something else if the conditions aren't sufficient to identify an actual point. If all they know is the country (as is the case here), then they should return an object that represents that country, rather than co-opting a point to represent the country and hoping that the people who build on their software will be diligent enough to check the precision as well and realize that the point is virtually useless.
They still should not be returning coordinates if the location is unknown.
But the location is known. The known location may not be sufficiently precise for some applications, but that's something only the application developer knows. For some applications, knowing the location is in the US, as opposed to Belgium, or China, or Tahiti, is good and useful information. These applications would be shortchanged if the API just said "no location found" when in fact the database *has* a location, an accurate one, just not a very precise one.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
A location is known. A usable location, which is what people usually mean when they refer to "the" location, was not known.
I work in mapping (GIS: Geographic Information Systems) and I see the same thing on a disturbingly regular basis (though at much smaller scales). People see a line/point on a map and they instantly assume that it is some perfectly resolved/certified/verified point. Even explaining to them that it is just a best guess often draws a blank stare. Specifically one of the things we map in our office are property lines, but as most of the information is based on aerial photos (with a accuracy variance of 3' 90% of the time), guesses of section corners (0.5-40' real world accuracy), descriptions that can be either 170 years old, improperly described, or accurate to within a 1/16 of an inch and you get some pretty severe variance in accuracy from description to description. You can tell people that the boundaries are only guesses (and take 10 minutes explaining all of the ways it could be off) and their neighbors will still sometimes come in a few weeks later complaining that they were waiving around the printout like it was a certified document. In this case I do find it a bit odd that they didn't code the point it a little differently, giving a "somewhere in this country" a specific GPS coordinate is a little odd. If it was a system I was setting up it would have either left the GPS coordinates as Null values with a secondary field the region (United States, Canada, Ohio, etc) or gave it a GPS coordinate near the center of the perceived region with a map scale code that suggested it was only accurate to within a country (1:2,000,000)
Your absolutely right. Just make sure you set aside 4 to 12 hours per day, every day for the rest of your life to deal with law enforcement and courts. And just budget for potential 10s of thousands of dollars in court costs that no one will repay when you're found innocent of each accusation. And be sure to have every single second of your life accountable to provide explanations when investigated. And all those colleagues and neighbors and business partners who constantly regard you with suspicion ... well, don't worry about them, because no one needs to interact with the rest of the world while this is going on; they'll acknowledge your innocence anyway because nobody ever thinks the worst.
Yeah ... nothing to fear.