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

Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[npslider]

Maybe their address is 404 Error Drive?

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[dgatwood]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[Anubis IV]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[TheGratefulNet]

kansas surely is at the point of know return. sort of a dust in the wind kind of state, if you will.

Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"?

[silentcoder]

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.

Re:That's Mr. and Mrs. Buttle ?

[npslider]

And a cloud based solution rides on the 4th horse of the Apocalypse.

Re:Sort of like Pokémon

[npslider]

I'm sure Pokemon has placed characters in Hell that dedicated players are just dying to get to...

Re:Cops in Kansas

[Anonymous Coward]

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....

They were told the family had a dog. Therefore, they showed up in order to shoot it.

Not a rounding error

[93 Escort Wagon]

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)

Re:Null means Null

[thegarbz]

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?

We have finally found it!

[npslider]

The physical location of /dev/null

Re:Null means Null

[swillden]

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.

Law enforcement, seriously?

[mysidia]

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 believe it

[Anonymous Coward]

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)