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Kansas Couple Sues IP Mapping Firm For Turning Their Life Into a 'Digital Hell' (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the digital-hell-inc dept.

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."

6 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Whatever happened to "location not found"? by Marxist+Hacker+42 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What asshole decided to hide the fact that the location isn't in the database?

    --
    SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
    1. Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? by dgatwood · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The location services do return an area. Specifically, they return a point plus a radius that indicates the confidence. If they know that the user is somewhere in the U.S., the point is in the middle, and the radius is half the width of the country.

      The problem is likely either that A. too many apps fail to show this in a way that the user can recognize as being an "I have no idea" result (e.g. by failing to visually highlight the accuracy radius or by not zooming out far enough to fully show the entire area enclosed within the accuracy radius), or B. lots of users are too clueless to understand that the highlight area around the point indicates the area in which the location could potentially be.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    2. Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? by AK+Marc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's for the application, not the map maker. The map maker gave the most accurate result possible, that the applications people screwed it up is a separate issue.

      --
      Learn to love Alaska
    3. Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? by silentcoder · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sometime in 2040.
      Off the west coast of Africa lies a graveyard of fallen drones and automatic-pilot ships. Rusty engines and hulls scatter the seafloor and a few not-yet-sunken ones bob along the surface of the water. The location: Longitude 0, Latitude 0.

      --
      Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
    4. Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The company should just buy some land, build a marker on it that says "this spot was chosen to represent 'some unknown place in the US'. If you came here because some app told you: dumbass".
      Have it nicely marked in all maps as "tourist" attraction, the "monument to dumbasses trusting geolocation apps".

  2. Law enforcement, seriously? by mysidia · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This is IP Address geolocation we're talking about here.

    More often than not it gets the State and City wrong.

    There's not a chance in hell of IP Address geolocation giving a reliable location down to the street address or location level.

    So WTF would Law enforcement be showing up based on Maxmind results?