"How an internet mapping glitch turned a random Kansas farm into a digital hell"

"There are lots of different ways a company like MaxMind can try to figure out where an IP address is located. It can “war-drive,” sending cars around the U.S. looking for open wifi networks, getting those networks’ IP addresses, and recording their physical locations. It can gather information via apps on smartphones that note the GPS coordinates of the phone when it takes on a new IP address. It can look at which company owns an IP address, and then make an assumption that the IP address is linked to that company’s office.

But IP mapping isn’t an exact science. At its most precise, an IP address can be mapped to a house. (You can try to map your own IP address here.) At its least precise, it can be mapped only to a country. In order to deal with that imprecision, MaxMind decided to set default locations at the city, state and country level for when it knows only roughly where the IP address lives. If it knows only that an IP address is somewhere in the U.S., and can’t figure out anything more about where it is, it will point to the center of the country...

in all, there are now over 600 millionIP addresses associated with that default coordinate. If any of those IP addresses are used by a scammer, or a computer thief, or a suicidal person contacting a help line, MaxMind’s database places them at the same spot: 38.0000,-97.0000.

Which happens to be in the front yard of Joyce Taylor’s house...

“That poor woman has been harassed for years,” Butler County Sheriff Kelly Herzet told me by phone. Herzet said that his department’s job has become to protect the Taylor house from other law enforcement agencies."

http://fusion.net/story/287592/internet-mapping-glitch-kansas-farm/

FB: "The physical mapping of computer addresses is one of the many aspects of the internet infrastructure that is almost completely unregulated. It is a task performed by private companies, and not just MaxMind. No one is officially in charge, and so there was no obvious party that Tony Pav or Joyce Taylor could go to in order to find out why this was happening, or get it fixed."