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Comment by joebergeron | Hacker News Reader

I get that this is indicative of a bigger issue: default behavior. Choosing to return something as arbitrary as //almost// the center of the US as a default when the location is unknown is pretty universally ridiculous. And in production code expected to have a huge user base and likely a lot of situations where there's no known location? Alright.

That said, after reading again and again how ridiculous desicions like these lead to these disproportionate real-world effects, I can't help but laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all. "Digital hell", indeed.

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I like how they 'fixed' it by moving the default to the centre of a lake. So you still have the waste of police (or whoever) driving out to some location before they figure out what's going on.

You would think it better to set it to a police headquarters.

Yeh good compromise. The ideal solution would be for their API to not report a precise location if it doesn't know one. I guess they have no simple method of stating a region rather than a point, and if they did the consumer of the APIs would probably just use the centre of the region most of the time.

I guess they could just not give lat/long when unknown, but still state country, state, county, etc. if they're known.

Exactly. If your API returned wkt text for the perimeter of the area, somebody who stores a simple lat-long pair is going to take the centroid and store that.

Completely agree with you. Just seems more sensible than the middle of a lake. Police will still turn up!

I wonder if it would be feasible to set it to one of the small islands map makers include to identify copyright infringements. Or, have a known fake territory where any 'dead' values can to be parked, such as the above.

That is not how location services work, you always at least 3 data points, Lat, Lon and Accuracy

http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location

It is up to the Developer to do sanity checks on the Accuracy for their type of application.

in some instances just knowing it came from the US or some other country is accurate enough.

To claim they should simply not return any data if they do not have an accuracy level to your arbitrary standards would make the service useless

IMO Max Mind is not the problem here, people taking the data and using it as if it is accurate to 1in is the problem.

Geo-location data on IP address has NEVER EVER been that accurate, NEVER. The fact the law Enforcement, Consumers and others use this data as the sole data point then act on that data is the problem, not that Max Mind Returned a Lat Lon to the center of the US

> To claim they should simply not return any data if they do not have an accuracy level to your arbitrary standards would make the service useless

Ideally they'd offer version of the service that gives a probability 'heat map', but in reality 99% of users would use a simplified version with an app configured threshold for what constitutes useful info for that app, and also how to convert a heat map to a single point (since that what most people seem to want) or a very localised region (e.g. within 100 meters or so).

In reality the simplified version would be provided as a service with a default threshold, anything under the threshold would not report a position, but could still report a country ISO code and perhaps state, county as optional extras. These are workable compromises to the ideal of everyone consuming a heat map in a sensible way (IMO).

>Ideally they'd offer version of the service that gives a probability 'heat map'

that is not "ideal" at all, one of the first uses of this data was for real time CC fraud Detection, giving a computer processing CC info a graphical "heat map" is less than useless. Most geolocation API data is consumed by computers that use it for many things, not presented to the user directly.

>In reality the simplified version would be provided as a service with a default threshold, anything under the threshold would not report a position, but could still report a country ISO code and perhaps state, county as optional extras.

It appears you believe this data is only for Human Consumption. If an API is designed to return LAT and LON and Accuracy, then that is what is should return, not an ISO country code. I get you believe no API should be designed this way, but I as a developer that consumes these services prefer it that way, makes it easier to write against

I as a developer am asking for Max Mind to give me Lat Lon and Accuracy, not a ISO Country Code or Heatmap

The heat map is the baseline data model; from that it's possible to derive simpler models for simpler use cases. However, providing access to the baseline model will likely be useful for some use cases. i.e. if you want something more nuanced than lat/long.

> It appears you believe this data is only for Human Consumption.

Most human's I've encountered don't refer to countries by their ISO code... most.

But MaxMind already do return ISO codes... The developers are picking and matching which returned values they want to consume.

I mean realistically it would be best to simply return "unknown location" or something of that nature. But barring that -clearly absurd- idea, set it to some place that's obviously incorrect. I propose the moon.

"Our last remaining topic of the day at this meeting, This years San Bernardino Sheriffs office request for a discretionary budget increase of 68bn Dollars for a "Space Capable Cruiser".

So at what level do you believe these service to be Accurate to before returning data? 10mi? 1mi? 50feet?

If they can not tell me what room in my home I am located should they simply return "the moon" as my location?

Different Services use this data for different reasons, some times simply knowing what nation the IP is from is enough, but you believe they should return "the moon" if all they can determine it is came from with in the US?

At least for towns that just have one zip code, I've sometimes seen the post office pinned as the town's location. (Although I'm not sure IP addresses will tend to correspond to towns as opposed to some other area.)

They should pick the White House.

...set it to a police headquarters.

This sounds like the setup for a cop-v-cop shoot-em-up movie.

And that 'fix' will likely hassle people living on the edge of the lake.

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