How Cartographers For the US Military Inadvertently Created a House of Horrors in South Africa (gizmodo.com)

Kashmir Hill, reporting at Gizmodo: The visitors started coming in 2013. The first one who came and refused to leave until he was let inside was a private investigator named Roderick. He was looking for an abducted girl, and he was convinced she was in the house. John S. and his mother Ann live in the house, which is in Pretoria, the administrative capital of South Africa and next to Johannesburg. They had not abducted anyone, so they called the police and asked for an officer to come over. Roderick and the officer went through the home room by room, looking into cupboards and under beds for the missing girl. Roderick claimed to have used a "professional" tracking device "that could not be wrong," but the girl wasn't there. This was not an unusual occurrence. John, 39, and Ann, 73, were accustomed to strangers turning up at their door accusing them of crimes; the visitors would usually pull up maps on their smartphones that pointed at John and Ann's backyard as a hotbed of criminal activity.

[...] The outline of this story might sound familiar to you if you've heard about this home in Atlanta, or read about this farm in Kansas, and it is, in fact, similar: John and Ann, too, are victims of bad digital mapping. There is a crucial difference though: This time it happened on a global scale, and the U.S. government played a key role. [...] Technologist Dhruv Mehrotra crawled MaxMind's free database for me and plotted the locations that showed up most frequently. Unfortunately, John and Ann's house must have just missed MaxMind's cut-off for remediation. Theirs was the 104th most popular location in the database, with over a million IP addresses mapped to it.

Comments

Disable SSID on your routers

[Dan East]

According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation. Further, the area in question has very few access points, so phones can potentially pick up these residential access points from thousands of feet away. Then they are geolocated to the exact position of the access point.

A solution is to disable SSID on your home router(s) so that these data-grabbing sniffers won't see it and try to geolocate off of it.

Re:Disable SSID on your routers

[Thelasko]

According to TFA, this was caused by stolen devices being in areas without a cell signal, and falling back on WiFi access point geolocation.

You read the wrong article. That's the case for the home in Atlanta.

TFA is actually the result of someone at the NGA deciding this guy's house was the geographical center of Pretoria. As is the case with the farm in Nebraska, any unknown location in Pretoria defaults to the geographical center. They emailed the NGA (who would have thought?) and the issue has been corrected. The default location is now Church Square in the NGA database.

Actual summary

[psnyder]

Many mapping systems give specific latitude and longitude coordinates and an accuracy radius for an IP address. When the accuracy radius is inaccurately large (like searching for a city, or a country) the coordinates arrow points in the middle, which can be someone's house. Someone using location services (like "Find My Lost Phone", and even police) often get these coordinates without understanding the accuracy sucks.

This particular case in South Africa happened because of a mapping service created by "National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency", which is part of the US Dept of Defense.

I'm not sure why useful information like this wasn't in the summary, but... I guess it made me read the article, so the jokes on me.

My favorite quote was from a guy that lives in this house. Right after the article says, "a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner", a few sentences later he says, "The Apple customers seem to be the worst."