How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell
fusion.net
fusion.net
It'd also be nice if they returned (-inf, -inf) or something so people know it's not a "real" location, lest folks start looking for the house closest to the lake.
If the uncertainty can vary, you have to explicitly indicate it. If returning an irregularly shaped region is too hard, you can at least return a center and a radius.
...or is that what they were already doing, and the problem comes from people ignoring the radius? In that case, yeah, I guess they were doing what they could, and good on them I guess for moving the center to somewhere that won't cause problems when people ignore the radius. But it doesn't sound like that's what they were doing in the first place?
And according to the Internet Archive, this element existed already in 2015, so they do not seem to have added it in response to this article.
What they did seem to have added in response to this article, however (as it is new), is a more explicit warning for their customers:
"Latitude and Longitude are often near the center of population. These values are not precise and should not be used to identify a particular address or household."
To be honest, I think it is very hard for an API provider to ensure that their customers will use all the right disclaimers when providing their data onwards to their customers... I think the new approach with pointing the general coordinates into uninhabitated spaces and adding that warning seems probably the best they can do without completely changing their API design (which would make many customers very angry, I would guess).
That way, when random strangers show up, they won't cause trouble and could even file a proper report if they wished.
And when actual law enforcement arrives, with battering rams and all, they also won't cause undue stress, given that where they will have arrived is a Police station.
Similarly, if the default location for the state of New York is the Oriskany Falls, NY police station, then how are they going to file a useful police report for something that happened in New York City?
The reasons given by the g'parent, for pointing to a police station, don't look like they would actually work in practice.
(0,0) would only be a useful default if you knew the IP address is located somewhere on planet Earth, but not more than that. And at time of writing, the vast majority (all?) of IP addresses are located on Earth anyway, so it's not especially helpful.
You could read the "country" field that is returned together with the location.
EDIT: added 'for the U.S.'
ADD: Here's a link to help: https://www.google.com/maps/place/38%C2%B053'23.3%22N+77%C2%...
the location from ip address is a fallback for when you don't have anything better, and it is a fallback you take with the caveat of "could be completely wrong".
this was my opinion of it when i first discovered the concept over 10 years ago.
the victims should bring legal action imo and law enforcement should get its shit together and act competently at the very most basic of levels.
ip based geolocation is and never was reliable. the idea that you can get a search warrant based off of it is laughable and indicates gross incompetence, not just in one place, but at every stage that such a thing is knowingly used.
using things you don't understand to draw concrete conclusions is stupid. literally. its the very definition of the word 'misguided'.
Why put more work onto the local law enforcement, who now have to deal with people from well outside their jurisdiction?
There are currently people who go to point X to complain or threaten. In your model, some will arrive at point X to find out it's a law enforcement facility. Many fewer will try to go to X if it's in the middle of a body of water, because it's more obviously not a place where people live. Placing X in the water means less time is wasted on a wild goose chase.
There are corrupt law enforcement officers. Isn't there the chance that, say, the state police will come to investigate small-town Mayberry with a single sheriff and deputy?
Law enforcement facilities do move. Who is in charge of updating the coordinates when the sheriff's office moves a few blocks away and another business moves into the old facility?
Even that isn't true. Plenty of corporations have all their IP addresses registered to their main office. In general the way these services work is that they ask the owner of the IP where they are and have no way to verify it at all. And of course there are always VPN services and proxy servers that will let you choose which country your IP address will read as being in. To say nothing of actually malicious parties that can break into a computer anywhere in the world and then make all of their traffic appear to have come from its IP address.
I've also seen the IP address entries for residential ISPs be off by more than a thousand miles simply because the ISP has customers in both places and assigned customers in one place IP addresses listed in the other place.
Geo IP can be useful for showing ads as long as you don't care that it's wrong some significant percentage of the time. Thinking it can be used to locate a bad actor is dangerous and absurd.
If 39°50′N = 39.8333333, then how does 38°N = 38.0000?
And why wouldn't they round to 40 and -99 (or -98) ?
OK, 39°50′N goes to 39.8333333. 50/60 is approximately 0.8333. Fine. But, 98°35′W should be -98.5833333, by the same rule they apparently just used, not 98.585522.
And I certainly don't see how 39.8333333 rounds to 38.0000 instead of 40.0000, or how -98.5833333 rounds to -97.0000 instead of -99.00000. It's like they rounded down and then subtracted 1.
And not sure about the rounding, but 38N, 97W just "looks" more central looking at the map, so I'm guessing they just played around with the numbers for a few minutes to get it to look nice.
I've definitely done this, picking arbitrary points to place a marker on a map for, say, a big city, county or national park.
Similar story [0] to a lesser degree is still horrible to the people it affects.
1. 600M IPs attached to the [Kansas] home were 10 orders of magnitude
higher than at any other location
X. 17M IPs located in Pav’s home in Ashburn.
2. location here has probably 60M associated IPs