Kansas Couple Sues IP Mapping Firm For Turning Their Life Into a 'Digital Hell' (arstechnica.com) 175
Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen "countless" law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. We covered this story on Slashdot a few months ago. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm. ArsTechnica adds:In their lawsuit filed against MaxMind, the IP mapping firm, the Arnolds allege: "The following events appeared to originate at the residence and brought trespassers and/or law enforcement to the plaintiffs' home at all hours of the night and day: stolen cars, fraud related to tax returns and bitcoin, stolen credit cards, suicide calls, private investigators, stolen social media accounts, fund raising events, and numerous other events." James Arnold has even been "reported as holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films."
Never Suspected (Score:2, Funny)
Plot twist: They are guilty of the accused and more, just hiding it underneath their 623 acres.
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Well, plenty of people will say, "where theres smoke, theres fire."
(of course, those people may be idiots)
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If you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear.
Re: Never Suspected (Score:2, Informative)
Your absolutely right. Just make sure you set aside 4 to 12 hours per day, every day for the rest of your life to deal with law enforcement and courts. And just budget for potential 10s of thousands of dollars in court costs that no one will repay when you're found innocent of each accusation. And be sure to have every single second of your life accountable to provide explanations when investigated. And all those colleagues and neighbors and business partners who constantly regard you with suspicion ...
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whoosh
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That is assuming that the system is sane.
If the people that have power to alter your life don't believe you, then you are just as screwed.
We have finally found it! (Score:5, Funny)
The physical location of /dev/null
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It had to be Kansas.
Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:4, Insightful)
What asshole decided to hide the fact that the location isn't in the database?
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It's not that the "location is not found", but that the location could only be generalized to being in the United States. The problem is, these people live in what's pretty much the center of the US and that is what this database returns.
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So they truly live in the Middle of Nowhere?
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Middle of Nowhere
Actually, that would be Null Island [nullisland.com].
It's strange that the default location is centered on the USA for a global coordinate system. At least 0.0, 0.0 is really out in the middle of nowhere.
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On a grander scale, I'd say this place may be the ultimate middle of nowhere: A supervoid
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... [telegraph.co.uk]
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It's not the default location. It's the default location for "USA". And it's not even the exact center of the US )it's a "cleaned up" version, aka an arbitrary spot close to, but not exactly at, the center). It would return 0,0 if it was unknown, but the IP address location was known - but only to the accuracy of the country.
The real problem is it's returning
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default location FOR IP ADDRESSES IN THE USA
That has no meaning. Unlike something like default browser settings, which actually work. No, this is a location returned by a business that sells IP location data to keep their performance statistics (and profits) up.
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So they truly live in the Middle of Nowhere?
If you define "The United States of America" as "Nowhere", yes.
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I would say, as would many, that Kansas is very close to nowhere, maybe not the exact middle, but a close second.
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When you see a billboard on I-70 which says, "Colby Kansas. Oasis of the Plains. 3 Hours Ahead." you know you're pretty much in nowhere.*
*For you Europeans, 3 hours gets you to the next country. You're still in Kansas 3 hours later and have about another hour until you get to Colorado. That doesn't include the previous hours of driving to get to the sign. All in the same state.
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Lol you know when you are in the middle of nowhere when you pass a sign that says in huge red letters "No Fuel for 500km" and then gives you 228km to the next intersection.
https://brianpas.wordpress.com... [wordpress.com]
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282km / 141 miles is to the next intersection.... It is 500km / 312 miles to the next fuel stop and there is NOTHING in between. No houses, no farms no anything. Just a dirt road and the occasional road train. I would also suggest given the quality of that road you won't be going over 100kph and my personal experience is you average 60kph in those types of conditions. If you managed to do that 500km in 6 hours it would be a damn good run.
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Here, have a look at this map to get an idea - https://www.google.com.au/maps... [google.com.au]
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228km is only 141 miles. That's 2 hours driving.
Are you going for a funny mod? Many of the roads around here, that would be 4 hours driving or longer if you stuck to the speed limit. Switchbacks slow you down. And once you get out into the boondocks, the roads get crappy, with a few thousand KMs between roads at times.
Here's a "road" with strictly enforced 25 km/h (10 km/h occasionally) speed limit for loaded trucks, empty can hit 60 km/h. 600 km, 3 rest areas, one emergency, one with laundry and showers, and the third in between. Not sure if any have a
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:4, Funny)
kansas surely is at the point of know return. sort of a dust in the wind kind of state, if you will.
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The location services do return an area. Specifically, they return a point plus a radius that indicates the confidence. If they know that the user is somewhere in the U.S., the point is in the middle, and the radius is half the width of the country.
The problem is likely either that A. too many apps fail to show this in a way that the user can recognize as being an "I have no idea" result (e.g. by failing to visually highlight the accuracy radius or by not zooming out far enough to fully show the entire area enclosed within the accuracy radius), or B. lots of users are too clueless to understand that the highlight area around the point indicates the area in which the location could potentially be.
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"Somewhere in the United States" is not a latitude and longitude location, and should not be reported as such.
The map on a typical IP address geolocation site does have a circle around it... but there is no statement that the circle indicates a radius of uncertainty (until you said that, I had no idea). And, in any case, if the uncertainty is 2000 miles in radius, the circle won't show up on the map, because it's off the edge.
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Anybody looking
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:5, Informative)
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Why? That's a location off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, which means that it doesn't even have the benefit of being useful for identifying the correct country, which is what the software is currently configured to do.
The real problem is that they're providing a point in these conditions in the first place. They shouldn't be. Instead, they should be providing something else if the conditions aren't sufficient to identify an actual point. If all they know is the country (as is the case here), then they should return an object that represents that country, rather than co-opting a point to represent the country and hoping that the people who build on their software will be diligent enough to check the precision as well and realize that the point is virtually useless.
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It should basically pop up on the screen: The target is within 2000 miles of this location. Zoom out to where you show the edges of the uncertainty radius always.
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not quite the most accurate possible, they rounded the centre of the US coordinates to the nearest degree. If they had reported the actual, accurate centre then this wouldn't have happened because it's over water.
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It's not a map at all (there were earlier stories about this couple prior to the lawsuit).
It's a single table in a database which almost all geolocation services are based on. That table contains the center of the country for any IP which could not be tracked closer than country level, for the US - it's that farm.
The data is poisoned and was poisoned by the company themselves when they used flawed logic in the algorithms they used to generate that data. The mapmaker is absolutely at fault because it does no
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The company should just buy some land, build a marker on it that says "this spot was chosen to represent 'some unknown place in the US'. If you came here because some app told you: dumbass".
Have it nicely marked in all maps as "tourist" attraction, the "monument to dumbasses trusting geolocation apps".
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And then deposit all their stolen devices there.
Wrong data is not a benefit nor useful (Score:2)
It would make more sense if they returned latitude 0, longitude 0.
Why? That's a location off the coast of Africa in the Gulf of Guinea, which means that it doesn't even have the benefit of being useful for identifying the correct country, which is what the software is currently configured to do.
You are making a fundamental error if you think that telling a user that an IP address is at a specific street address in Kansas when all that is known is that it is registered somewhere in the United States is a "benefit" and it is in any way "useful."
Telling them that it's in the Atlantic Ocean at 00 is a far better indication of "I don't know" than giving a wrong address that actually exists.
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If only I had addressed those points in a second paragraph...
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No, (0,0) is just as idiotic. The software should return NULL or throw an exception.
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No, it is idiotic, but not as idiotic. "0,0" will let pretty much every user know that the data is missing.
Here's a metaphor. If you are weighing a letter to see how much postage is needed, and for some reason the scale is malfunctioning, if it reads "0 grams", you probably can guess it's not making a measurement. If it has a little microprocessor inside that reads garbage from the sensor, and it's programmed so that if the sensor reading makes no sense, the scale should report out a plausible average va
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I wouldn't tolerate that behavior in a scale, either! Even a seven-segment LCD can display "ERROR."
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"Somewhere in the United States" is not a latitude and longitude location, and should not be reported as such.
Exactly. It should return something like, "United States, location unknown".
Hey, I live "somewhere in the United States", come by and visit me!
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Application developers are brushing off their responsibility and just saying "it wasn't our fault, the Maxmind database told us it was there!", but in reality the database told them a lot more.
Ahh, okay. Thank you.
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Your answer seems to be in conflict with your credentials. [geoffreylandis.com] The provider of data should not be the interpreter of information. You state the facts as you know them and your confidence in those facts. If the best they can do is "the United States" then the logical reply is of course "the center of the US" with a radius of inclusion being the maximum distance reaching out from the center that could be included. What is done with that data is the responsibility of the interpreter and communicator of informa
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OK...but the radius should include Alaska and Hawaii...and possibly Guam and the Bikini Atoll.
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime in 2040.
Off the west coast of Africa lies a graveyard of fallen drones and automatic-pilot ships. Rusty engines and hulls scatter the seafloor and a few not-yet-sunken ones bob along the surface of the water. The location: Longitude 0, Latitude 0.
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This is a failure of API design then. If the location can't be localized, there should be no specific location returned AT ALL. Or shit like this happens.
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er... "if a specific location can't be specified", I meant to say.
Re:Whatever happened to "location not found"? (Score:4, Funny)
Maybe their address is 404 Error Drive?
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It's "location is the us" and would be like "center of us plus very big radius" and people just assume the center of the circle must be a good starting point, without looking at the radius.
That's Mr. and Mrs. Buttle ? (Score:3)
Just goes to show that when computers make an error it gets multiplied millions of times over.
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To err is human. To really foul things up requires a computer.
Re:That's Mr. and Mrs. Buttle ? (Score:5, Funny)
And a cloud based solution rides on the 4th horse of the Apocalypse.
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Conputers don't make mistakes, programmers do.
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Just goes to show that when computers make an error it gets multiplied millions of times over.
We used to call that "accurate to 10 insignificant digits."
It could always get worse (Score:2)
Let's hope Pokemon Go does not decide to add special edition characters to their barn!
Null means Null (Score:3)
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The article said they move the "default" location to the middle of the lake. It may just take a while for everyone to get and apply the updates.
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I wonder if, going forward, law enforcement agencies will start spending millions of dollars regularly dredging that lake...
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It could make for some nice sandy beaches...
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eventually it will be consistent.
Re: Null means Null (Score:2)
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Yeah, like how they now they default to my yacht in the Cheney Reservoir.
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Re:Null means Null (Score:4, Informative)
Null means null, and a location means a location. There's no point returning null as actual data is known, in this case the USA.
As was covered previously the system that returns the data also returns the accuracy of that data. It was ultimately the end users of the database who decided to implement a simple GPS co-ordinate without the associated accuracy data. Why trash the database is programmers are too stupid to use it?
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Re:Null means Null (Score:5, Informative)
They still should not be returning coordinates if the location is unknown.
But the location is known. The known location may not be sufficiently precise for some applications, but that's something only the application developer knows. For some applications, knowing the location is in the US, as opposed to Belgium, or China, or Tahiti, is good and useful information. These applications would be shortchanged if the API just said "no location found" when in fact the database *has* a location, an accurate one, just not a very precise one.
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They still should not be returning coordinates if the location is unknown.
But the location is known.
You could say the same thing for a result that returns "Earth, somewhere..." instead of saying it for "United States, somewhere".
If the location cannot be narrowed down further than half a continent, then the location is most definitely not known.
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Waay back I used the maxmind IP DB to determine which country users where from - it was all I needed. In that scenario "USA" Would be a perfectly usable location for me.
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A usable location
Usable is in the eye of the beholder.
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Society, having implemented subk's dictat, promptly collapsed. For Professor Heisenberg had already proved that it was impossible to be certain of an object's location, and subk had decided that the concept of precision simply required too much thought. Freight service everywhere simply stopped, as the pickup and delivery locations for any item were decidedly "unknown."
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position and momentum
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The location is known. The location is somewhere in the USA so the software rightfully returns the GPS co-ordinates for the centre of the USA and error margin that covers the entire country.
Re: Null means Null (Score:2)
But that would be wrong. There is a location and they're as close to it as they can be. It is somewhere in the lower-48 US, so they return a rough centre and a radius that encompasses the region the address is in.
There are a lot of these that go to a geographic centre of a city or state as well, as that is the best accuracy they can provide.
All legitimate uses of their data (I have used it on a few projects.) would not be negatively affected by this lack of exact precision. The people at fault are those tha
Cops in Kansas (Score:2)
Law enforcement actually shows up and looks for stolen property??? I have been watching my stolen tablet on device manager for two days and I can't get the local police to do more than offer to forward me to the number to file a police report. I may need to think about moving to Kansas....
Re:Cops in Kansas (Score:5, Funny)
Law enforcement actually shows up and looks for stolen property??? I have been watching my stolen tablet on device manager for two days and I can't get the local police to do more than offer to forward me to the number to file a police report. I may need to think about moving to Kansas....
They were told the family had a dog. Therefore, they showed up in order to shoot it.
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This is why "To Protect and Serve" is nor more like "To Collect and Harass"
It's not MaxMind's fault (Score:2)
They may have been using the original Pentium processor when they designed it. But I can see how that would leave a chip on anyone's shoulder.
If they are going to sue, sue someone with deeper pockets!
Not a rounding error (Score:5, Informative)
It's not even remotely a "rounding error".
According to the TFA, the geographic center of the US is located at (39.8333333,-98.585522). In 2002, MaxMind "decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38N 97W or 38.0000,-97.0000" - an arbitrary decision that, given the values picked, is pretty much the opposite of a rounding error.
(Sorry for the lack of degree and minute symbols, but blame Slashdot for that)
Sigh (Score:2)
It's not the mapping firm's issue that the end users of the database don't take into account to associated accuracy data.
Also we covered it previously, and we got it right previously. Why do we claim the problem is a "rounding error" now? Just because Ars don't know what they're talking about?
I hope they win, but give them only fair chances (Score:3)
MaxMind didn't send all those yokels off on spurious missions. Are you your brother's keeper?
It's not a simple legal argument, here. You have to argue that MaxMind should have had a reasonable expectation that yokels will be yokels.
The next step in the argument, it seems to me (I don't give a shit that IANAL), is to claim that enabling yokels to be yokels is an explicit element of the MaxMind value chain, from which MaxMind extracted all kinds of proceeds.
Then it could be argued that this was such an integral element of their value chain as to have induced them into invented a "not found" representation which masqueraded as a valid search result, so as to deliberately create a superficial impression that "not found" results hardly ever happen. That would be the strong condition, but hardest to establish. MaxMind will counter that this was a merely a technical felicity, and that it's no crime to be lazy.
In the strong condition, I see it as absolutely the case that MaxMind sought gains from negligent asshattery.
I also think there's a good chance this case can't demonstrate the strong condition, and only a modest chance they obtain damages from the mild condition.
If MaxMind has a moral backbone, they'll settle out of court for a conscionable amount, unless the aggrieved are in full-on casino mode.
The aggrieved definitely deserve compensation here, but if they have to collect directly from the yokels who caused the disturbances, good luck with that.
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Nice to know that providing provabl
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The whole case will hinge on the fact that MaxMind changed the default "centre of the US" coordinates from the actual centre to the coordinates of their farm, in some kind of strange "rounding" scheme that has no apparent mathematical basis.
If they had just used the centre, they could say it was an accident and the court would probably accept it. Because they chose coordinates without bothering to check if they were suitable or considering the consequences, they made themselves liable for some of the stuff
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If they return a precision/confidence value then no, they are not responsible.
Law enforcement, seriously? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is IP Address geolocation we're talking about here.
More often than not it gets the State and City wrong.
There's not a chance in hell of IP Address geolocation giving a reliable location down to the street address or location level.
So WTF would Law enforcement be showing up based on Maxmind results?
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my guess is that some self-appointed white knight found something disturbing on a porn site he "happened to stumble upon", and then took it upon himself to Sherlock his way, through whois and google maps, into thinking that these girls were being held at the physical location associated with the porn site through multiple cross-referenced databases.
this sounds insane, and it is, but people really are like that [acme.com] and always have been. everyone is looking to right someone else's wrong and be a hero, often becau
I believe it (Score:5, Informative)
I work in mapping (GIS: Geographic Information Systems) and I see the same thing on a disturbingly regular basis (though at much smaller scales). People see a line/point on a map and they instantly assume that it is some perfectly resolved/certified/verified point. Even explaining to them that it is just a best guess often draws a blank stare. Specifically one of the things we map in our office are property lines, but as most of the information is based on aerial photos (with a accuracy variance of 3' 90% of the time), guesses of section corners (0.5-40' real world accuracy), descriptions that can be either 170 years old, improperly described, or accurate to within a 1/16 of an inch and you get some pretty severe variance in accuracy from description to description. You can tell people that the boundaries are only guesses (and take 10 minutes explaining all of the ways it could be off) and their neighbors will still sometimes come in a few weeks later complaining that they were waiving around the printout like it was a certified document. In this case I do find it a bit odd that they didn't code the point it a little differently, giving a "somewhere in this country" a specific GPS coordinate is a little odd. If it was a system I was setting up it would have either left the GPS coordinates as Null values with a secondary field the region (United States, Canada, Ohio, etc) or gave it a GPS coordinate near the center of the perceived region with a map scale code that suggested it was only accurate to within a country (1:2,000,000)
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Re:Sort of like Pokémon (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure Pokemon has placed characters in Hell that dedicated players are just dying to get to...
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Sorry! I just could not help myself. I just got all fired up. ;)
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But they are able to determine location. They identified the country and nothing more. Their API returns an accuracy radius which is the number of kilometers for which they are 67% certain that the user resides. So they picked a point in KS and presumably returned a very large radius.
They claim they get within 40km 83% of the time. How anyone could thing this is ever suitable for showing up at someone's house is unbelievable.
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For a lot of geolocation stuff, that's good enough. It's good enough for Netflix certainly.
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It is acceptable if the "receiver" specified the location as continental USA. Otherwise your example is illogical, not relevant and thoroughly ludicrous!
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I'm at a loss for when it could ever work. Maybe for businesses that have a dedicated subnet that's properly geolocated, but I don't think i've ever had a residential address that maxmind has done better than a mile or two accuracy.
Really, their complaint should be with the local jurisdictions that show up and make their life hell.
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If you were to take the information available from my posts, and assume my user name is indeed my first and last name concatenated, you could easily find a street address on the internet. Unless someone with an IRBM simply doesn't like me, the street address is more useful for finding my house than the exact latitude and longitude.