https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-mapping-lawsuit-kansas-farm-ip-address
Geolocation company’s glitch sent police and angry businesses to a remote Kansas farm looking for criminals, and now the residents want compensation.
IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.
It wasn’t just police who turned up on the Arnolds’ doorstep. Angry business owners would turn up claiming someone at the residence was sending their business thousands of emails and clogging their computer systems. Other people became convinced that someone living at the residence was responsible for internet scams.
A Kansas family whose remote farm was visited “countless times” by police trying to find missing people, hackers, identity fraudsters and stolen cars because of a glitch is suing the digital mapping company responsible.
James and Theresa Arnold sued MaxMind on Friday, filing a complaint in the US district court in Kansas. MaxMind, based in Massachusetts, allows companies to find out the location of the computers used by individuals to access their websites.
According to the complaint, the husband and wife team dealt with five years of “digital hell” after moving into the property in Butler County, Kansas, in 2011.
The couple had been drawn to the farm because it was close to the nursing home where Theresa’s mother was being cared for and the school that their two sons attended. The landlord also allowed the sons to hunt and fish on the surrounding 620 acres of land.
The first week after they moved in, two deputies from the Butler County sheriff’s department came to their house looking for a stolen truck, something that would happen again and again over the subsequent years.
“The plaintiffs were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state or federal officials looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide,” the complaint said. At one point, James Arnold was reported for holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making child abuse films.
For half a decade the family was mystified about why this was happening until April this year when Fusion’s Kashmir Hill revealed the truth.
It all came down to glitch in the MaxMind’s IP address mapping database.
IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique identifiers associated with computers or networks of computers connected to the internet. Through its GeoIP product, MaxMind matches IP addresses with their assumed geographic location, and sells that information to companies so they can use it to, for example, show targeted advertising or send someone a cease and desist letter if they are illegally downloading films
IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.
More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database.
It wasn’t just police who turned up on the Arnolds’ doorstep. Angry business owners would turn up claiming someone at the residence was sending their business thousands of emails and clogging their computer systems. Other people became convinced that someone living at the residence was responsible for internet scams.
More here:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/09/maxmind-mapping-lawsuit-kansas-farm-ip-address
