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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."
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.
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...
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
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.
The physical location of /dev/null
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.
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?
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)