> I'm not sure the company really did anything wrong here.
I wouldn't say it's "wrong", I don't believe they did it maliciously. Negligence I think is the more appropriate term. Their software when it encounters an IP it doesn't know should say that, not simply return the default position. That would be like if every time you searched for a recipe that some website didn't know, it just gave you the recipe for macaroni and cheese.
> That would be like if every time you searched for a recipe that some website didn't know, it just gave you the recipe for macaroni and cheese.
If all the recipes are on one page, and it knows you want pasta, it can make sense to link you to an arbitrary recipe in the pasta section.
The article is poorly worded, but this is a default US address, along with default state and default city addresses. It's not what you get when the IP is totally unknown.
The thing is that it never knows for sure. And in many/most cases, it only knows an area best case. In the case of only knowing it's the US, yes, it's a big area. Yet, for a variety of reasons, developers/users find it useful to get a point returned to substitute for that area. Which is what this company does.
I'm not sure how that's negligent just because developers and/or users of various kinds don't understand the limits of the data they're using. If anyone is negligent, it's developers who use this data and provide it to users without caveats about its accuracy and precision.
If the software returns this point in such a way where there is no way to tell whether it's saying "this is RIGHT here" from "this is somewhere in this massive area" then that's a huge fail on the UI designer behind it. And again, if the software just doesn't know, then it shouldn't return the point at all. Why would you? It doesn't mean anything and it's not useful.
I wouldn't say it's "wrong", I don't believe they did it maliciously. Negligence I think is the more appropriate term. Their software when it encounters an IP it doesn't know should say that, not simply return the default position. That would be like if every time you searched for a recipe that some website didn't know, it just gave you the recipe for macaroni and cheese.