Slashdot Mirror
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."
Plot twist: They are guilty of the accused and more, just hiding it underneath their 623 acres.
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.
Just goes to show that when computers make an error it gets multiplied millions of times over.
Let's hope Pokemon Go does not decide to add special edition characters to their barn!
When there is no record, they should return no result at all. If that is not an option, at least return an obviously bogus location like, gee, I dunno.. 0,0. Which happens to be in the middle of an ocean. Choosing an arbitrary spot in the country is just plain idiotic. I hope they have to fork out the max in punitive damages for being such morons.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
Law enforcement actually shows up and looks for stolen property??? I have been watching my stolen tablet on device manager for two days and I can't get the local police to do more than offer to forward me to the number to file a police report. I may need to think about moving to Kansas....
I'm sure Pokemon has placed characters in Hell that dedicated players are just dying to get to...
They may have been using the original Pentium processor when they designed it. But I can see how that would leave a chip on anyone's shoulder.
If they are going to sue, sue someone with deeper pockets!
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
It's not the mapping firm's issue that the end users of the database don't take into account to associated accuracy data.
Also we covered it previously, and we got it right previously. Why do we claim the problem is a "rounding error" now? Just because Ars don't know what they're talking about?
MaxMind didn't send all those yokels off on spurious missions. Are you your brother's keeper?
It's not a simple legal argument, here. You have to argue that MaxMind should have had a reasonable expectation that yokels will be yokels.
The next step in the argument, it seems to me (I don't give a shit that IANAL), is to claim that enabling yokels to be yokels is an explicit element of the MaxMind value chain, from which MaxMind extracted all kinds of proceeds.
Then it could be argued that this was such an integral element of their value chain as to have induced them into invented a "not found" representation which masqueraded as a valid search result, so as to deliberately create a superficial impression that "not found" results hardly ever happen. That would be the strong condition, but hardest to establish. MaxMind will counter that this was a merely a technical felicity, and that it's no crime to be lazy.
In the strong condition, I see it as absolutely the case that MaxMind sought gains from negligent asshattery.
I also think there's a good chance this case can't demonstrate the strong condition, and only a modest chance they obtain damages from the mild condition.
If MaxMind has a moral backbone, they'll settle out of court for a conscionable amount, unless the aggrieved are in full-on casino mode.
The aggrieved definitely deserve compensation here, but if they have to collect directly from the yokels who caused the disturbances, good luck with that.
*groan*
The physical location of /dev/null
Sorry! I just could not help myself. I just got all fired up. ;)
But they are able to determine location. They identified the country and nothing more. Their API returns an accuracy radius which is the number of kilometers for which they are 67% certain that the user resides. So they picked a point in KS and presumably returned a very large radius.
They claim they get within 40km 83% of the time. How anyone could thing this is ever suitable for showing up at someone's house is unbelievable.
"The" location is generally understood to not be the entire country unless you think its acceptable to say, "I sent you a package. You didn't get it? It's right here by my desk. The location was the entire continental United States, right?"
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?
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.
You are making a fundamental error if you think that telling a user that an IP address is at a specific street address in Kansas when all that is known is that it is registered somewhere in the United States is a "benefit" and it is in any way "useful."
Telling them that it's in the Atlantic Ocean at 00 is a far better indication of "I don't know" than giving a wrong address that actually exists.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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)
For a lot of geolocation stuff, that's good enough. It's good enough for Netflix certainly.
I'm at a loss for when it could ever work. Maybe for businesses that have a dedicated subnet that's properly geolocated, but I don't think i've ever had a residential address that maxmind has done better than a mile or two accuracy.
Really, their complaint should be with the local jurisdictions that show up and make their life hell.
Nice to know that providing provably incorrect information has no negative consequence. Who knew?
Why is Snark Required?
The whole case will hinge on the fact that MaxMind changed the default "centre of the US" coordinates from the actual centre to the coordinates of their farm, in some kind of strange "rounding" scheme that has no apparent mathematical basis.
If they had just used the centre, they could say it was an accident and the court would probably accept it. Because they chose coordinates without bothering to check if they were suitable or considering the consequences, they made themselves liable for some of the stuff that happened.
It's the fact that they picked a location that makes them somewhat liable for the consequences of that decision.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
All the Pokemon are born
It is acceptable if the "receiver" specified the location as continental USA. Otherwise your example is illogical, not relevant and thoroughly ludicrous!
If they return a precision/confidence value then no, they are not responsible.
If you were to take the information available from my posts, and assume my user name is indeed my first and last name concatenated, you could easily find a street address on the internet. Unless someone with an IRBM simply doesn't like me, the street address is more useful for finding my house than the exact latitude and longitude.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I hope the couple wins big. They deserve it.