Image caption The farm in Kansas is near the centre point of the USA A US couple is suing an internet mapping firm for $75,000 (£58,000) after years of "digital hell". MaxMind matches IP addresses, which are used to connect devices to the internet, to physical locations. It has said these are not meant to be precise. James and Theresa Arnold say it registered their home as the position of more than 600 million addresses. They say this has led many people to wrongly believe a host of crimes were committed at the property. "The first week after the Arnolds moved in, two deputies from the Butler County Sheriff’s Department came to the residence looking for a stolen truck. This scenario repeated itself countless times over the next five years," documents filed with a Kansas court read. The Arnolds complained they have been disturbed at all hours 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 issue came to light in April after an investigation by Fusion, a TV network and website, which reported that the property’s owner Joyce Taylor and her tenants had been accused of being "identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters" for years. IPs can be used to identify individual houses but can also be imprecise. Sometimes, they only refer to the country a device is in and, in some cases, even that information can be inaccurate. Fusion said Ms Taylor’s troubles were the results of IP mapping by MaxMind, which chose her property as the default spot for IPs it could not locate more precisely other than saying they were in the USA. The house in Kansas, which the Arnolds rented out in 2011, is near […]
