The Glitch That Kept Sending The FBI To A Tiny Kansas Farm

Video written by Adam Chase

[WildBluntHickok]

I once was on Google Earth and noticed a ton of tourist photos linked to this one spot in the middle of the ocean. I assumed there was a tiny island there and I was zoomed out too far, but there was nothing there when I zoomed in. Plus all the photos seemed to be of different locations. Then I noticed the coordinates: zero latitude and zero longitude. That spot in the ocean is where photos on google earth that are missing their location data go to die.

[AmericanActionReport]

Several decades ago, a man in Florida had a similar problem that had a very low-tech explanation: The man had acted in a police training film distributed to police departments throughout Florida. For years thereafter, policemen would stop him on the grounds that he looked suspicious. They associated his face with criminal suspects, though they couldn't remember exactly where they'd seen his face. After "achieving" a nationwide record for being stopped by the police the most times of anyone in America, the poor man moved to another state.

[someoneelse]

On a much smaller and less irritating scale, a big company changed their phone number and left a voicemail to their new number, but it was so badly made that it sounded like my phone number, so my phone was ringing off the hook.
I contacted the company and asked them to fix the voicemail so people would stop calling me, but they didn't
So I started cancelling their orders, telling their customers to go to other companys and the finall piece, they had ordered a truck load of gravel, and when the truck driver called to ask where he should put it, just dump it in a pile outside the front door.
They changed their voicemail to CLEARLY spell out their new number.

[tcoren]

What I find strange is that for all that time they never thought to ask "hey sheriff deputy, is there a particular reason you believe the stolen items are here? This is a weekly occurrence for us"

[pmmichalczuk]

Perfect cover! Now they can do all of this stuff without raising any suspicion - they would just say that it is a bug.

[Kafaldsbylur]

At my work, we do tracking of GPS devices. One vehicle we were tracking would occasionally apparently teleport to Kansas before returning to its regular location (skewing our data thanks to moving hundreds of kilometres in a fraction of a second and back). We found it quite weird and couldn't quite figure out what was happening, until we looked at what was at that specific point in Kansas.

Garmin HQ.

[QuestionMan]

Ironically, this glitch would also have allowed MaxMind to accurately determine the source location of a lawsuit against them.

[MouseDenton]

This situation is a perfect summary of my concerns about advancing technology: it's not that AI will become too powerful on its own, or that algorithms will turn us into cattle, but that the people with the authority to empower tech to fuck with our lives are believing the sales pitch of those who provide it, ignoring its limitations and even utilizing it in ways it's not equipped to be implemented.
The greatest threat from a tool often isn't malice, but incompetence.

[Wookiee]

As an IT person nothing bugs me more than people who think doing something like this has tracked down an exact location of a person rather than a generic plot on a map near where the ISP is

[ZeekDaGeek]

Sam, I think you might want to know how predatory your advertising partner, Fabulous, is:

- No where on their website do they list the price of their service, they only mention that it's annual.
- There doesn't seem to be any refund policy in place.
- In order to get close to signing up, you must provide an email, before they tell you a price.
- Once you've given them your email they won't delete it, so far I've sent two request for my account to be deleted so they stop emailing me.
- They ask you to choose a price for their service "based on what you think it's worth" meaning that they will charge you as little as 1$ per month, then once it renews at 50$ I suspect there's no getting your money back.

Regardless of if their service is good everything about it felt like a scam during the sign up process that I didn't go through with it.

[one_smol_duck]

I'd expect this from the government, but it makes me kind of nervous that this is a service provided by a private company that private citizens can use to trace IP addresses to locations. That seems very dangerous. Also -- like come on. This is one of the worst hacky software "solutions" I've ever heard of. The fact that they changed it to the middle of a lake, instead of catching null values with some sort of error message, makes me so mad. Don't give your users coordinates when you don't know the coordinates. That's so stupid

[powerofanimegod]

Should've had a dog named courage would've cleared up most of the problems for them

[MephiticMiasma]

Reminded of a guy who went to get personalized license plates for his car. The form had three options for what you wanted your new car plates to say. He put "Hiking" as one, "Swimming" as two, but couldn't think of a third option he liked. So he just put "no plate" to indicate he didn't want one if he didn't get his first two choices.

He got his new plates. They read "No plate"

Then he started getting parking tickets from all over the state, as every time the police wrote down 'no plate' it all came back to him.

[BallisticDamages]

That would be an absolute nightmare to constantly deal with, on so many levels. I would definitely look into legal action. This kind of stuff can go from ruining your night, to ruining your reputation, to being a threat to your family. And those relying on these databases need to understand that these systems are not perfect, because the people who make them are not perfect.

[DoggosintheHouse]

I love how you get to the point where this couple have sued the company that was making their lives hell, and how their lives continue to be hell.... and then just walk away and start talking about your sponsor without any further follow up or summary.

[jager]

These folks should have been able to sue this company out of business and used the money to relocate. They are in serious risk of injury or death because of this companies incompetence.

[MeterLP]

Apart from endangering innocent farmers, spitting out specific coordinates in the middle of the USA instead of saying "IDK, somewhere in the USA" seems like terrible user interface design.
All those people who harrased those farmers were sent on a wild goosechase to nowhere because the software didnt give a clear answer. Imagine driving multiple hours to get your laptop back, only to find a confused couple who dont have your laptop.

[richardroland]

The agencies harassing these folks are without excuse, and it should be they who have the hell sued out of them. An IP address is NOT a personal identity.

[fxshlein]

"Normally what you should do in a Situation like this is make sure the coordinates are in the middle of a lake or something"

No. How about just not spitting out coordinates at all? Display an error message, or a confidence value. If its actually just spitting out two coordinates, this is not on the agencies or people involved, this is 100% on that company not handling edge cases correctly.

[andres.]

"glitch" implies it was accidental and they just didn't code something right or didnt account for something but did account for it and they purposely coded it to that location it wasn't a glitch it was just negligence