Re: GeoIP database issues and the real world consequences

[Joel Maslak <jmaslak () antelope net>]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:


> So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of
> laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would
> get 38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that.

It does seem needed to the geo location companies too, at least several of
them provide this - and it's been this way for a long time.

I didn't remember if Maxmind does or not, so I just checked.  From some of
their documentation, the field "accuracy_radius" is returned which is "The
radius in kilometers around the specified location where the IP address is
likely to be." See
http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location .  I don't think
it's in their free stuff (you get what you pay for, it seems).

It doesn't show up on their web interface to "try" the service nor does it
give a warning that these things can be wrong, but IMHO probably wouldn't
be a bad idea to say "Don't go show up at this address - it might not be
right!"