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from the this-is-not-the-address-you-are-looking-for dept.
An hour's drive from Wichita, Kansas, in a little town called Potwin, there is a 360-acre piece of land with a very big problem. The acreage is quiet and remote: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks and a two-story house. It's the kind of place you move to if you want to get away from it all.
But instead of being a place of respite, the people who live on Joyce Taylor's land find themselves in a technological horror story. For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They've been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They've been visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They've found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
All that and more because the farm's geographical coordinates where naively chosen as the default location in a widely used database of IP address to physical location mappings.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JNCF on Monday April 11 2016, @06:19PM
It sounds like MaxMind was explaining their interface correctly, but their interface was being used by other companies that represented the data incorrectly to end users. I don't think MaxMind is the irresponsible party here; if lawsuits were the answer they should at least target the companies that represented the data incorrectly.
He continued: “At that time, we picked a latitude and longitude that was in the center of the country, and it didn’t occur to us that people would use the database to attempt to locate people down to a household level. We have always advertised the database as determining the location down to a city or zip code level. To my knowledge, we have never claimed that our database could be used to locate a household.”
But people do use it that way. Five thousand companies draw information from MaxMind’s database. And most casual internet users don’t know anything about IP mapping defaults—they just know that when a website tells them that their scammer lives in Potwin, Kansas, they get in the car and go.
“A lot of apps use this data without warning people it’s not scientifically accurate,” said security researcher Maynor. “How do you educate people that the thing popping up on their screen as the location of an IP address isn’t reliable?”
There's some legitimate-sounding critisms of the interface in the comments of TFA, but an interface can be poorly designed and still be described correctly. I'm pretty sure we don't launch lawsuits over poorly designed APIs yet.