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