The default location for Pretoria, South Africa: someone's backyard.
yes, this blog is mostly dead, but my friend Thy Tran sent me this article from Gizmodo about a global geolocation fuckup that's, in its own small way, quite spectacular. And I had to put it on here.
At the private home in South Africa of a human rights lawyer and his nurse mother:
The visits came in waves, sometimes as many as seven a month, and often at night. The strangers would lurk outside or bang on the automatic fence at the driveway. Many of them, accompanied by police officers, would accuse John and Ann of stealing their phones and laptops. Three teenagers showed up one day looking for someone writing nasty comments on their Instagram posts. A family came in search of a missing relative. An officer from the State Department appeared seeking a wanted fugitive. Once, a team of police commandos stormed the property, pointing a huge gun through the door at Ann, who was sitting on the couch in her living room eating dinner. The armed commandos said they were looking for two iPads.
See, it seems that those "find my phone" applications -- and many, many other geolocation apps -- are fed data by a company called Maxmind, which draws its geolocation data from a U.S. federal government agency, the NGA. Much of this data is mapped to IP (internet provider) addresses; and when an IP can't be mapped to a specific address, it's mapped generally to a city.
But instead of providing an entire city on the map, the NGA, and then Maxmind, choose a central location in that city and make that the default address for the entire city. They, of course, provide what's called an "accuracy radius" (of 5 miles or 100 miles or what have you,) but the apps they feed the data to aren't required to also provide this data (except in their fine print, away from search results.)
So when someone goes looking for a stolen laptop that ended up somewhere in Pretoria, South Africa, they will be directed straight to the house of the human rights lawyer and his nurse mother, which is the default location for all of Pretoria.
There's, apparently, also a house in Kansas which is the default location for all of the United States. And there are many others.
This is the perfect story for our times. Especially the part where the South African lawyer and his mother were being sued by an online store that had fallen so woefully behind on their orders that they were being accused of fraud and cyberbullied. Naturally, they traced the location of their cyberbullies to ... well, you know where.
So a cascade of failures on one side (from the NGA to Maxmind through whatever series of lazily organized apps) and on the other (from the online store's poor management through its customers' unacceptable online behavior) all landed on the doorstep of some good folks who had nothing to do with anything.
No one was deliberately creating FAKE NEWS, but multiple layers of falsehood were created all the same, through laziness, through irresponsibility, through greed (that of the app middlemen, trying to make a buck without providing thorough information,) through the willingness of multiple layers of people to jump to conclusions and go from zero to nuclear in five seconds ...
You don't need bad faith, deceit, or corruption in this world. The internet provides the ability for your smallest mistakes to go viral, and no one is holding anyone accountable for those.
Recent Comments