
Eh?
"the coordinates 38.0000,-97.0000 if no location was defined. That's rounded up from 39.8333333,-98.585522"
What is this "rounding" that you speak of? How does it work and what is it used for?
A couple in Butler County, Kansas, US, is suing web mapping company MaxMind after their rented home was the default physical location for all IP addresses in America. Whenever anyone used MaxMind's geoIP databases to look up where an internet IP address is associated, the software would default to the coordinates 38.0000,-97. …
> Why set a default? Have they never heard of "Undefined" or "Not available".
They set it to the "middle" of whatever's the smallest geographical unit they can define. If they can only say "it's in the US" then these poor bastards get tagged since they're roughly in the middle of the US.
I'll bet there's other people that get screwed the same way, just not as often, that happen to be in the "middle" of particular states. I hope this wakes up more such lawsuits.
> why didn't they just say no data was available for that IP address
Because it's hard to sell a dataset that looks like
nnn.nnn.nnn.nnn NaN NaN
[repeat] ....
....
....
....
What would be interesting is to know just how many "default" locations, i.e. non-data records, were being sold to MaxMind's customers.