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."

Comments

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[Geoffrey.landis]

"Somewhere in the United States" is not a latitude and longitude location, and should not be reported as such.
The map on a typical IP address geolocation site does have a circle around it... but there is no statement that the circle indicates a radius of uncertainty (until you said that, I had no idea). And, in any case, if the uncertainty is 2000 miles in radius, the circle won't show up on the map, because it's off the edge.
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Anybody looking at that would probably understand that "zero" indicates something other than "it is located here", but anybody who actually DOES try to go there will go to a undistinguished spot in the Atlantic Ocean.

Re:Null means Null

[subk]

They still should not be returning coordinates if the location is unknown. We wouldn't be having this discussion--and there would be no lawsuit to worry about--if the database said "Sorry. I don't know where that is. But if you kindly look to the Country record, you will see that it is in an IP block used in USA"