17 ms·

Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones?

361 points by cremno 11y ago

JonnieCache 11y ago
Now this is interesting. Presumably the coordinates of their house are significant in some way. The result of some kind of truncation perhaps? I can't see how a floating-point error could converge on a specific value like this, but I'm no expert in such things. If they could only post their address the answer would surely be found very quickly, but that would defeat the object somewhat. I suppose it's fortuitous that nobody lives at 0,0...
- flipp3r 11y ago
  My guess is that there are probably tools used by criminals to trick anti-theft software into passing a false location. You can quite easily fake your geolocation.
  - JonnieCache 11y ago
    Why would they all go to this one place though? Perhaps the sellers of the tool configured it with a default location. Now that would be cruel.
- tomlongson 11y ago
  0,0 is Null Island! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
  - b_emery 11y ago
    There's a weather buoy there: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010 http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010 Must be a hell of a crossing party associated with maintaining that.
  - nod 11y ago
    Here's their site: http://nullisland.com/ http://nullisland.com/
- RyJones 11y ago
  I have pictures I take in Idaho turn up in Mongolia due to a sign error - these are taken with the default iOS photo app.
- seiji 11y ago
  Sorry, but it's actually really simple. It's the same reason why on a Jet Blue flight, my phone shows me geolocated to Long Beach, CA for the entire flight (if I don't hold the phone up to the windows). Phones prefer wifi positioning, and that's based on the base station mac addresses. If you are in a highly wifi dense area, moving one AP can auto-propogate its new location by phones reporting in bulk groups of mac addresses they scan at once back to your location provider. ("30 mac addresses detected are know to be in Dublin, but one mac address detected is known to be in New York. Let's update the New York mac address to be Dublin now.") The auto-location-updating is one reason SkyHook wireless died. Once they did the initial scanning, the entire wifi location database can be made reasonably self-updating (and other correlative updates can happen with your drive-every-street-in-the-world mapping vans much less often. Wifi position is more accurate than GPS positioning (plus, faster to locate and less power intensive), so it's always preferred first. GPS positioning is worse (accuracy/power requirements), so GPS tends to be a fallback if you're in a "broad location" category like cell tower only positioning or zero-location positioning (airplanes, mountain tops, etc).
  - mikeash 11y ago
    GPS is definitely more power hungry and easily blocked, but when you get a solid signal it's far more accurate than WiFi positioning. GPS will pretty reliably nail down your location to within 2m or so, while WiFi positioning is probably an order of magnitude worse. The main use for WiFi positioning (besides devices that simply don't have GPS capability at all) is for indoor location, because GPS signals tend to penetrate buildings poorly.
- Semiapies 11y ago
  I wondered if they might live on an integer latitude/longitude coordinate, but checking street view on the few that are anywhere near a street in the Atlanta area seems negative.
xlayn 11y ago
Other options: -The name of the wireless in a database and picking up the first one, could not be fixable changing the router name or ip address as it is already recorded somewhere -Same for other routers or ip address in the neighbor -Maybe it's not their fault but someone else did it on purpose, e.g. take the cell phone and manipulating it inside a room with stolen/faked/forged data somewhere else and wrapped in a metallic sphere to block signals so only the forged router can be used? -Even more crazier: put a router really close and put there a vpn/proxy?
- ghaff 11y ago
  Wouldn't hurt to change the MAC of the router (and the SSID while they're at it).
  - gknoy 11y ago
    They said they reset it, but I am surprised they didn't buy a completely new one to guarantee a different hardware fingerprint.
    - c22 11y ago
      They might not understand the concept of a hardware fingerprint. The article mentions that they also "changed the frequency" of their ap which would seem to me extremely unlikely to make a lick of difference.
  - MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
    The problem is not that the router is currently broadcasting a BSSID that exists elsewhere. The problem is that a geo-wifi database contains an association between their address and a BSSID. They can change the router, and eventually the problem should sort itself out (if it is indeed their router and not a neighbor's that is the issue), but it's going to take until the old record ages out of the database for it to happen. And that could be months or years.
    - 11y ago
marincounty 11y ago
Part of me feels if you can't keep track of your phone, you shouldn't have one. I found this guy's iPhone. Called him up, and told him to meet me at high-tech burrito. He asked me if I would bring the phone to his home--at least 10 miles away. I was close to tossing it out the my car's window, but I had him meet me at the burrito place. If you only knew how special these drones I live among believe they are.
mapgrep 11y ago
My money is on a wifi SSID that matches the one used by thieves or a heavily-trafficked location the victims all pass through. My company moved ~5 blocks and it really screwed up the map on my phone (which I use to get around the city) for several months. My company had left the network SSID the same in the old location, so that no one had to re-configure their wifi. Even with GPS on, my phone was always convinced it was in the old location up the block, and this would persist even when I was out on the street, until I walked around a bit. There are companies (presumably Skyhook is one of them) who drive around mapping SSIDs to physical locations. The problem is that SSIDs can move or be duplicated elsewhere. The article says of one of the couple "at one point he reset their router, and changed the frequency at which it broadcasts; it didn’t solve the problem." It does not say if he changed the SSID. Theoretically, location is often determined using not just one but several nearby SSIDs, a sort of triangulation. Another possibility here is that there are multiple nearby SSIDs around this home that match the SSIDs surrounding some other area tied to the victims.
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  I thought it was the MAC addresses of routers which were used for mapping, not SSIDs. Duplicate SSIDs are very common.
  - mapgrep 11y ago
    Good point. My understanding is that both SSID and MAC address are typically used as inputs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
    - JonnieCache 11y ago
      I guess it's not exactly difficult for the likes of google to remove the millions of 'Netgear' SSIDs from their dataset.
      - lucb1e 11y ago
        I always wondered how it would handle lesser known systems, like the SSID "Train's on-board WiFi" (Dutch: "WiFi in de trein") that we have in the Netherlands. There are not a million trains, but they do appear in a million places. Like with airlines, I'd think they notice, or have a script to detect, "oh we have a bunch of locations many kilometers apart" and then remove them, but since I don't use WiFi location services (I don't agree to share my location with Google 24/7) I don't actually know.
bloaf 11y ago
I wonder if the couple could make a profit on this mishap by suing anyone who accuses them of stealing phones (i.e. on social media) after visiting their house.
- bitsweet 11y ago
  likely the company that provides the data source would be more liable
- nness 11y ago
  The geolocation would probably be enough evidence for claims of libel to be ineffective.
  - bloaf 11y ago
    Hence the after I deliberately emphasized. If they had already visited the house and not found their phone (especially if the police were there) then subsequent claims of theft against the couple would be much closer to libel.
    - refurb 11y ago
      So you're saying the couple would have to allow a stranger to go through all their person belongings until they were satisfied the phone wasn't there and then sue? Doesn't sounds like something I'd want to do.
ck2 11y ago
The only way they are going to get this fixed is to sue the company making the locating software. Kicking in their door is the least of it - some cop is going to shoot them when they scream or react the invasion.
patrickmay 11y ago
I found this particularly disturbing: > In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him. > > “Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest,” the officer said, according to Saba." The police shouldn't be able to detain someone for over an hour without probably cause and without arresting them.
- craigmccaskill 11y ago
  Would not the location tracking telling them the girls phone was inside the house be probable cause? Seems more reliable than a dog alerting on a car.
  - cmiles74 11y ago
    Whoever said that the phone location tracking was anywhere near this level of reliable? IMHO, it's really only good as a sort of hint on where your phone _might_ be.
    - anikamariam 11y ago
      do you think the police care?
    - phil21 11y ago
      Which is more reliable than other pieces of evidence that meet the probable cause bar. Such as a police dog alerting. Certainly seems to meet the (pathetically low) threshold to me at least.
    - such_a_casual 11y ago
      You must have missed the article where a judge ruled the police are not responsible for making sure technology is reliable, even drug tests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814544 (Police plan and execute a SWAT raid based on a bogus field test of tea leaves. Judge ruled the police are not responsible for knowing that the tests are completely inaccurate.)
fibbery 11y ago
Crazy idea: install a heavy, wood engraved sign in front of their house that says "No, your phone isn't here".
- manmal 11y ago
  If I were a regular phone thief, I would do exactly that, no?
  - et2o 11y ago
    Probably not
  - frogpelt 11y ago
    I'm gonna guess no.
- ortusdux 11y ago
  Good idea. I would add on police contact info with a case number.
- mod 11y ago
  Print the article I just read, frame it by the doorbell.
kazinator 11y ago
What's sad is how the local police seem to have some sort of learning disability or amnesia about this problem. They showed up there repeatedly and harassed the occupants.
- ehaughee 11y ago
  Disclaimer: I agree with the intent of your comment but, as this is the second time I've seen this comment in this thread, I'll bite and play devil's advocate. Additionally, I have absolutely no knowledge of dispatch or any other law enforcement software. Where would the knowledge of this phenomena be stored? Does the dispatch software have a notes field? If so, is it procedure to put that sort of information in place? Do cops have access to it? If so do they regularly look at it? If "no" to those points, how would a police force as large as Atlanta's maintain that knowledge? A lot of large organizations rely heavily on tribal knowledge, so that's a possibility. But only assuming officers always patrol/police the same areas and never quit or get fired, or if they do, they always pass on the entirety of their tribal knowledge to the successor. So again, I agree with the general sentiment, but this doesn't have to be a matter of incompetent law enforcement personnel. It could easily be a problem of lacking software and a system prohibitively large to maintain that kind of granular information among all agents.
  - kazinator 11y ago
    > Where would the knowledge of this phenomena be stored? In the same place where cops record false intruder alarms and give people a warning or fine for too many.
    - blantonl 11y ago
      Good point - but there is potential incoming revenue to pay for that. In this very remote use case, I doubt CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) vendors are going to write this use case into their development plans. Unless they saw this on HN...
  - manarth 11y ago
    I would hope that the police do have a systematic method of correlating incidents with addresses. Such as, say, a history of reported domestic abuse. Or homes with residents that have been threatened with doxxing or swatting. And information such as whether the resident is a recorded gun-owner. I would sincerely hope that information such as this would be available to any officer dispatched to an address.
kelvin0 11y ago
Once this is resolved, we might temporarily have a way to fool the 'illegal' surveillance gear used by law enforcement? Unless they use some completely different scheme to snoop on cell phone users?
akavel 11y ago
Given that people coming to them have their info from somewhere, there might be chance they could succeed through asking those visitors where exactly do they have the data from, and then trying to contact/file the complaint to this specific service/company/...
cubano 11y ago
You know, its not completely out of realm of the possible that these people are lying and really know much more then they are telling police. I am not implying anything about these people, but I am just saying it isn't impossible. I lived in Las Vegas for a couple of years and was involved with some people who, from the outside, seemed like very normal folk...in fact, in many ways, I was someone like that, too, due to issues I was fighting at the time. We all have a different set of experiences in our lives, and, unfortunately for me I suppose, my experiences make me think about this in a different way then many here might.
- coderdude 11y ago
  Based on the article that would also mean they're kidnappers and/or murderers so it might be best to avoid playing the Devil's advocate on this one.
  - true_religion 11y ago
    Or... They are involved with people who steal, buy or refurbish stolen phones.
    - coderdude 11y ago
      I wish the article mentioned where all these people are coming from. If they're all local then that could lend credibility to that explanation. If they're from all over the country then that doesn't seem as likely. The thought did cross my mind.
- lovemenot 11y ago
  One is an engineer, the other a journalist. Maybe they or their "friends" have the skill and the motivation to hack the system, generate false positivrs to get published. Maybe this is someone trolling them, like swatting.
such_a_casual 11y ago
$1 says it's some null value. This is a good premise to an "off-by-one" parable where it turns out the neighbors are phone thieves.
BatFastard 11y ago
<sarcasm> It's the man-bun that guy is wearing. Phone's are set to hunt those guys down and beat the crap out of them.</sarcasm>
- ChrisClark 11y ago
  Yes, let's bully someone because of their appearance.
- chad_strategic 11y ago
  Man-buns are lame, but beating the crap out of them seem a little extreme for sarcasm
Splines 11y ago
My guess is that some IP-to-Geolocation service says nothing more specific than "Atlanta" and this couple happens to live in the geocenter of Atlanta.
- femto113 11y ago
  This is roughly my guess as well, though I'd guess a ZIP code or some similar geographical construct (ZIP3, ZCTA, etc.) rather than a city name.
sideproject 11y ago
I had a similar experience about a month ago, when I thought I lost my iPhone 5s. Logged onto "Find my iPhone" app and it told me it was about 1km away from my house. I thought I must've dropped it somewhere nearby. So I got the address from Apple Map, drove there and knocked on the door to greet a rather defensive (obviously) lady who, of course, denied ever picking up an iphone that day. I snooped around to see if there were any suspicious people around, maybe she has a wayward son who goes around and steals other people's phones. I then went to the police office nearby and asked them what I could do. They told me they can't use the GPS tracking as an evidence for a search warrant - doh! It was frustrating because the app was telling me that my phone was right there! At the back of this lady's house! At this moment, I was going through all sorts of thoughts - such as "should I break into her house at night?", "should I go back and just barge into her house and locate my phone and shout 'AH HA! I KNEW IT! YOU THIEF"! Feeling dejected, I came home, only to find my phone sitting on the top of my drawer. 2 seconds ago, I swear I thought she was the thief. Apple - you disappointed me.
- GhotiFish 11y ago
  out of curiosity, does it only show you a single point? Does it not show you the potential error? I'm working on a mapping app that uses GPS data and the first thing we had to address was the fact that the data we got from the GPS units in the field are not perfect, they have error, hell they report their error, and our application shows that error as part of the map data. based on the data we have gotten from mobile phones, when a phone approximates its position based on cell towers it spits out a large error. That surely is being shown, right?
  - PhantomGremlin 11y ago
    Does it not show you the potential error? I often use Find My Friends to keep track of the kids. I presume its location methodology is similar to Find My iPhone. Here's how it behaves: About 10% of the time, it doesn't show a current location at all for the kid. It does remember the previous one, so it will show a location and say something like "46 minutes ago". When it does display a location, about 60% of the time it's a single spot. The remaining 30% of the time it is a spot enclosed by a tinted circle. That circle can be a few hundred feet in diameter, or it can be more than 5 miles in diameter. This is the potential error. However, I'd bet that 95% of the people looking at it don't understand the concept of "potential error". So to them, the enclosing circle doesn't exist. Edit: forgot to add, about 2% of the time it will show an "exact" location, what I called a "spot", no "potential error" circle. Then a minute later it will show a different exact location a few miles away. Then a minute later yet a third exact location another mile or two away. So in other words, about 2% of the time it is really confused (the kid is stationary the whole time).
Swannie 11y ago
What's shocking is the lack of a clear explanation by the so-called experts contacted in this article. My explanation as to what is likely happening: "Every WiFi router has a special unique number - think of it as serial number - baked into the device by the manufacturer (known as a MAC address). Manufacturers request a range of these unique numbers from the IEEE, and are never meant to duplicate them. When you connect to a WiFi router, you connect to its friendly name (SSID), but also your phone receives a part of this special unique number (BSSID address) [1]. Companies like Apple, Google, and SkyHook, record the location of WiFi routers using this unique number. When a phone or other device has a strong GPS location and a strong WiFi signal, they can fairly reliably assume that this unique number is at this specific location. However, not all manufacturers strictly follow the unique number allocation rule, as getting allocations can be a time consuming process. 999 times out of 1000, reuse of these numbers is not a big issue, and goes undetected. In this case, it is likely that the thieves are using, or are located near, a WiFi router with the same unique number as this couple. Changing this special unique number is sometimes possible on expensive enterprise grade WiFi routers by knowledgeable experts, but not possible or advisable on home routers. The couple should change their WiFi router." Yes, I have conflated a number of terms there for simplicity. For technical accuracy: WiFi router -> access point. Edit: added [1] https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/FAQ/How-is-the-BSSID-derived-from-the-Access-Point-ethernet-MAC-address https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/FAQ/Ho... As BSSID is != MAC address.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
tarikjn 11y ago
Changing their router or even turning it off won't necessary help. Here is a way to reproduce this issue and explain my point: if you are a thief, you could setup a GPS spoofer pointing to that house or have had your router in that house in the past so that some phones registered/verified it's MAC address to be at the house location. Now assume the thieves live in a location where they took this router with them and where there is no GPS signal or other router or cell signal, but only the thieves' router turned on. Now as soon as the thieves connect the stolen phones to their router, they will report being at the house. My bet is that this is likely an intentional attack by the thieves and that they are aware of what they are doing. There is a small chance they could have been people living in the house before or drove by to setup their spoof as it would have been much easier than getting their hands on a GPS spoofer.
adevine 11y ago
If I were them, I would try a non-technical (or at least mitigation) strategy: put a sign in their yard or on their front door that says "Sorry, we don't have your iPhone" and a description of the problem and screengrabs/URLs of articles like this.
jrochkind1 11y ago
> Lekei said by email that the couple’s router could be causing the problem; if misconfigured, it could be broadcasting that it’s a different location than it actually is Wait, what? Is my router broadcasting a location to someone? What technology is this, and how do I make sure my router isn't doing it?
- barrkel 11y ago
  http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-google-and-everyone-else-gets-wi-fi-location-data/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-google-and-everyone-else-ge...
mdip 11y ago
Based on my experience with a few phones I own, there's a few things that could be happening here: It was mentioned the "SSID"/MAC address problem. It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID and are encountering a MAC address collision (assuming MAC address is always taken into account, which I'm not sure that it is). Their router is likely part of some database that the GPS uses when the phones enter an area with WiFi but no cellular service or line of sight to the satellites. I had a similar failure every time I went indoors to an archery facility I visited weekly for three months. Both my wife's and my phone would think we were a clear 30 miles away in another city the second we got far enough into the building to lose cellular service. I dug into it and discovered it was using WiFi APs to get location. I think the archery place has another location in that other spot, so it's possible they swapped WiFi gear at some point, but it's anyone's guess. Another possibility, hinted at in the article, is that there's no other location data available to the stolen phone (no mapped WiFi, no cellular service) but it has an IP address so the devices are falling back to Geo IP which is extremely inaccurate (my IP address changed recently and I am now a Canadian according to location services on my PCs with no GPS capabilities -- 200 miles off). It could be a circumstance of "that IP isn't known, but that block is owned by x ISP and here's a general location of where that is ... only the little dot happens to land on their house. It would be really smart for apps that track location for theft purposes to keep a reasonable history. If it's a mobile phone, the last known high-accuracy reading from the GPS should be presented along with lower accuracy results to help in situations like this. I'd imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult to correlate several readings over a period of time and discard ones that are clearly not sane (as would have been the case with my phone in the archery place). A bonus would be to perform other actions when the device is marked "stolen", like take photos at certain intervals and upload them to the cloud to make it easier to "prove" your phone is in the hands of someone it shouldn't be (one of the tools I had did something like this).
- egypturnash 11y ago
  > It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID The guy is an engineer. I'm pretty sure their SSID has a silly in-jokey name.
strathmeyer 11y ago
Why do they keep answering the door?
- kagamine 11y ago
  Eugine Ionescu probably has the answer to that. You see, when the doorbell rings it means that there is somebody there waiting for the door to be opened. But not always.
incompatible 11y ago
"Avast’s software kept tracking the phones after the other programs were cleared with a factory reset" Does anyone know how that works?
- lenomad 11y ago
  It should work only for those phones which came with Avast factory installed. After you do a factory reset and turn on phone, they send an SMS to contact their server. This gives them the phone number which can then be used by the server to send remote commands to the phone. One of my phones had McAfee pre-installed with a similar setup. If you do a factory reset and they find that it is a different phone number now, the phone locks down (You can enter a pin to unlock). You can't even access the bootloader or do another factory reset.
  - cwilkes 11y ago
    A phone had McAfee on it? I can't imagine how slow and painful it was to use that.
qume 11y ago
If this community can't pin point the problem together, then there is something up here. Clearly this warrants Google, Apple, the telcos and someone from an electronic forensic team each putting a part time expert into a team to figure this out for everyones benefit - themselves and this couple. Of course the reality is that key Google and Apple staff know exactly what has caused this and don't have a ready solution so are keeping quiet. In any case, if there are Google or Apple employees reading, perhaps you can suggest this idea to someone internally in the chance there may be some progress before someone innocent gets killed for 'stealing' a phone.
etingel 11y ago
The problem is likely that the location where these phones are really at is near the WiFi router that used to be at this address. No amount of messing with their router will help with fixing this, since those phones aren't there to begin with. The couple might have better luck hitting up the previous tenants/owners. Based on this line from the article, I'm almost certain that this is the real answer: > It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together.
tlrobinson 11y ago
I wonder how easy it would be to spoof the location of a device with WiFi gear that can broadcast multiple arbitrary BSSIDs?
trunnell 11y ago
How about GPS spoofing? There's a claim that it's been done before [1]. Maybe a criminal organization has the resources to build a GPS spoofing device that's used in their "holding facility" before they root the phone? Can anyone with RF or GPS experience guess the difficulty? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...
dghughes 11y ago
A teen in Canada tracked his lost cellphone to a home and was killed trying to get it back. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jeremy-cook-18-killed-after-tracking-down-lost-phone-in-london-ont-1.3114847 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jeremy-cook-18-killed-...
plasticchris 11y ago
I had something similar happen when I was in college visiting a friend and the police show up asking who dialed 911, if she was alone, etc. This was before ssid based geolocation become popular. I had to spend some time explaining how inaccurate cell tower positioning is, most people just assume that if the cops say it came from inside the house it must have.
wahsd 11y ago
This is just a hunch, but does anyone know whether there is any connection / shared services between the phone finding system and the iMessage airline flight tracking system? It may just all be coincidence, but that flight tracking feature is so wonky and jacked, giving false locations, legs, flights, and information on the regular. I am surprised it hasn't caused a massive outcry for just how horrible it is. It kind of makes me wonder whether there is some shared service or database or something because the flight lookup feature just smells of the same kind of failure. I realize, most people don't know/recall that iMessage will auto-link flight numbers. Just message the full flight number.
IvyMike 11y ago
It would be fascinating for someone to log into their Google Location History and see where the phone was right before it was at this house. It might provide a clue. https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0 https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0
- veb 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing this link, I had no idea Google had your location history so nicely accessible like this. I knew they kept track, but never once did it occur to me that I could see it.
mangeletti 11y ago
I didn't finish the entire article, but my immediate thought was that this has something to do with these new phone drop spots that I've seen at grocery stores. You apparently can just put a phone in one of these ATM-like machines and get money out, which immediately struck me as a clever way to buy stolen phones on the cheap from criminals, with indemnity... which would definitely lead to situations like this when those stolen phones are resold to unsuspecting consumers.
DigitalSea 11y ago
I know it is an inconvenience, but couldn't they just maybe get a new router and see if that fixes the problem? Surely a cheap router is better than getting your house ransacked by police?
- pawelk 11y ago
  It won't make any difference if it's caused by some random router being correlated with their physical address. Phones connecting to that router will still be reported as being located near the house, even if the family cut off electricity and wrapped the house in a Faraday cage.
jbb555 11y ago
I looked on https://maps.google.com/locationhistory https://maps.google.com/locationhistory at what google think my location is. Usually it's pretty accurate. But several times a year there are major anomalies For example showing me traveling the 4 miles to work in London via a quick journey to Oslo. It's pretty reliable but not 100%
ucho 11y ago
Ignoring everything else - if it the phone that went missing, should the location at least be accurate to nearest base station. In case of missing child operator would provide triangulation results, right?
TuringTest 11y ago
There is an obvious and simple solution to this problem; although it's not up to this couple to implement it, but to all the developers building or using geo-location. This is a problem caused by incorrect data representation. Everything the companies know about the location of the phones is an imprecise area, yet they are representing it with this: [1] This absurdly precise representation doesn't convey the error margins of the information available, and it's what's convincing people that this couple's home is the point that they're looking for. The mapping companies are misleading their users by hiding the level of confidence about the information provided. Please all front-end developers, don't use a map pin to represent a place in the map if you don't know their coordinates or exact address. A circle with a radius proportional to the uncertainty area is the best representation in that case. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=icon+map+pin&biw=790&bih=750&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&tbm=isch&tbs=isz:i https://www.google.com/search?q=icon+map+pin&biw=790&bih=750...

361 points by cremno 11y ago

Now this is interesting. Presumably the coordinates of their house are significant in some way. The result of some kind of truncation perhaps? I can't see how a floating-point error could converge on a specific value like this, but I'm no expert in such things. If they could only post their address the answer would surely be found very quickly, but that would defeat the object somewhat. I suppose it's fortuitous that nobody lives at 0,0...

flipp3r 11y ago
My guess is that there are probably tools used by criminals to trick anti-theft software into passing a false location. You can quite easily fake your geolocation.
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  Why would they all go to this one place though? Perhaps the sellers of the tool configured it with a default location. Now that would be cruel.
tomlongson 11y ago
0,0 is Null Island! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_Island
- b_emery 11y ago
  There's a weather buoy there: http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010 http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/station_page.php?station=13010 Must be a hell of a crossing party associated with maintaining that.
- nod 11y ago
  Here's their site: http://nullisland.com/ http://nullisland.com/
RyJones 11y ago
I have pictures I take in Idaho turn up in Mongolia due to a sign error - these are taken with the default iOS photo app.
seiji 11y ago
Sorry, but it's actually really simple. It's the same reason why on a Jet Blue flight, my phone shows me geolocated to Long Beach, CA for the entire flight (if I don't hold the phone up to the windows). Phones prefer wifi positioning, and that's based on the base station mac addresses. If you are in a highly wifi dense area, moving one AP can auto-propogate its new location by phones reporting in bulk groups of mac addresses they scan at once back to your location provider. ("30 mac addresses detected are know to be in Dublin, but one mac address detected is known to be in New York. Let's update the New York mac address to be Dublin now.") The auto-location-updating is one reason SkyHook wireless died. Once they did the initial scanning, the entire wifi location database can be made reasonably self-updating (and other correlative updates can happen with your drive-every-street-in-the-world mapping vans much less often. Wifi position is more accurate than GPS positioning (plus, faster to locate and less power intensive), so it's always preferred first. GPS positioning is worse (accuracy/power requirements), so GPS tends to be a fallback if you're in a "broad location" category like cell tower only positioning or zero-location positioning (airplanes, mountain tops, etc).
- mikeash 11y ago
  GPS is definitely more power hungry and easily blocked, but when you get a solid signal it's far more accurate than WiFi positioning. GPS will pretty reliably nail down your location to within 2m or so, while WiFi positioning is probably an order of magnitude worse. The main use for WiFi positioning (besides devices that simply don't have GPS capability at all) is for indoor location, because GPS signals tend to penetrate buildings poorly.
Semiapies 11y ago
I wondered if they might live on an integer latitude/longitude coordinate, but checking street view on the few that are anywhere near a street in the Atlanta area seems negative.

xlayn 11y ago

Other options: -The name of the wireless in a database and picking up the first one, could not be fixable changing the router name or ip address as it is already recorded somewhere -Same for other routers or ip address in the neighbor -Maybe it's not their fault but someone else did it on purpose, e.g. take the cell phone and manipulating it inside a room with stolen/faked/forged data somewhere else and wrapped in a metallic sphere to block signals so only the forged router can be used? -Even more crazier: put a router really close and put there a vpn/proxy?

ghaff 11y ago
Wouldn't hurt to change the MAC of the router (and the SSID while they're at it).
- gknoy 11y ago
  They said they reset it, but I am surprised they didn't buy a completely new one to guarantee a different hardware fingerprint.
  - c22 11y ago
    They might not understand the concept of a hardware fingerprint. The article mentions that they also "changed the frequency" of their ap which would seem to me extremely unlikely to make a lick of difference.
- MatthaeusHarris 11y ago
  The problem is not that the router is currently broadcasting a BSSID that exists elsewhere. The problem is that a geo-wifi database contains an association between their address and a BSSID. They can change the router, and eventually the problem should sort itself out (if it is indeed their router and not a neighbor's that is the issue), but it's going to take until the old record ages out of the database for it to happen. And that could be months or years.
  - 11y ago

marincounty 11y ago

Part of me feels if you can't keep track of your phone, you shouldn't have one. I found this guy's iPhone. Called him up, and told him to meet me at high-tech burrito. He asked me if I would bring the phone to his home--at least 10 miles away. I was close to tossing it out the my car's window, but I had him meet me at the burrito place. If you only knew how special these drones I live among believe they are.

mapgrep 11y ago

My money is on a wifi SSID that matches the one used by thieves or a heavily-trafficked location the victims all pass through. My company moved ~5 blocks and it really screwed up the map on my phone (which I use to get around the city) for several months. My company had left the network SSID the same in the old location, so that no one had to re-configure their wifi. Even with GPS on, my phone was always convinced it was in the old location up the block, and this would persist even when I was out on the street, until I walked around a bit. There are companies (presumably Skyhook is one of them) who drive around mapping SSIDs to physical locations. The problem is that SSIDs can move or be duplicated elsewhere. The article says of one of the couple "at one point he reset their router, and changed the frequency at which it broadcasts; it didn’t solve the problem." It does not say if he changed the SSID. Theoretically, location is often determined using not just one but several nearby SSIDs, a sort of triangulation. Another possibility here is that there are multiple nearby SSIDs around this home that match the SSIDs surrounding some other area tied to the victims.

JonnieCache 11y ago
I thought it was the MAC addresses of routers which were used for mapping, not SSIDs. Duplicate SSIDs are very common.
- mapgrep 11y ago
  Good point. My understanding is that both SSID and MAC address are typically used as inputs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_positioning_system
  - JonnieCache 11y ago
    I guess it's not exactly difficult for the likes of google to remove the millions of 'Netgear' SSIDs from their dataset.
    - lucb1e 11y ago
      I always wondered how it would handle lesser known systems, like the SSID "Train's on-board WiFi" (Dutch: "WiFi in de trein") that we have in the Netherlands. There are not a million trains, but they do appear in a million places. Like with airlines, I'd think they notice, or have a script to detect, "oh we have a bunch of locations many kilometers apart" and then remove them, but since I don't use WiFi location services (I don't agree to share my location with Google 24/7) I don't actually know.

bloaf 11y ago

I wonder if the couple could make a profit on this mishap by suing anyone who accuses them of stealing phones (i.e. on social media) after visiting their house.

bitsweet 11y ago
likely the company that provides the data source would be more liable
nness 11y ago
The geolocation would probably be enough evidence for claims of libel to be ineffective.
- bloaf 11y ago
  Hence the after I deliberately emphasized. If they had already visited the house and not found their phone (especially if the police were there) then subsequent claims of theft against the couple would be much closer to libel.
  - refurb 11y ago
    So you're saying the couple would have to allow a stranger to go through all their person belongings until they were satisfied the phone wasn't there and then sue? Doesn't sounds like something I'd want to do.

ck2 11y ago

The only way they are going to get this fixed is to sue the company making the locating software. Kicking in their door is the least of it - some cop is going to shoot them when they scream or react the invasion.

patrickmay 11y ago

I found this particularly disturbing: > In June, the police came looking for a teenage girl whose parents reported her missing. The police made Lee and Saba sit outside for more than an hour while the police decided whether they should get a warrant to search the house for the girl’s phone, and presumably, the girl. When Saba asked if he could go back inside to use the bathroom, the police wouldn’t let him. > > “Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest,” the officer said, according to Saba." The police shouldn't be able to detain someone for over an hour without probably cause and without arresting them.

craigmccaskill 11y ago
Would not the location tracking telling them the girls phone was inside the house be probable cause? Seems more reliable than a dog alerting on a car.
- cmiles74 11y ago
  Whoever said that the phone location tracking was anywhere near this level of reliable? IMHO, it's really only good as a sort of hint on where your phone _might_ be.
  - anikamariam 11y ago
    do you think the police care?
  - phil21 11y ago
    Which is more reliable than other pieces of evidence that meet the probable cause bar. Such as a police dog alerting. Certainly seems to meet the (pathetically low) threshold to me at least.
  - such_a_casual 11y ago
    You must have missed the article where a judge ruled the police are not responsible for making sure technology is reliable, even drug tests: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814544 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10814544 (Police plan and execute a SWAT raid based on a bogus field test of tea leaves. Judge ruled the police are not responsible for knowing that the tests are completely inaccurate.)

fibbery 11y ago

Crazy idea: install a heavy, wood engraved sign in front of their house that says "No, your phone isn't here".

manmal 11y ago
If I were a regular phone thief, I would do exactly that, no?
- et2o 11y ago
  Probably not
- frogpelt 11y ago
  I'm gonna guess no.
ortusdux 11y ago
Good idea. I would add on police contact info with a case number.
mod 11y ago
Print the article I just read, frame it by the doorbell.

kazinator 11y ago

What's sad is how the local police seem to have some sort of learning disability or amnesia about this problem. They showed up there repeatedly and harassed the occupants.

ehaughee 11y ago
Disclaimer: I agree with the intent of your comment but, as this is the second time I've seen this comment in this thread, I'll bite and play devil's advocate. Additionally, I have absolutely no knowledge of dispatch or any other law enforcement software. Where would the knowledge of this phenomena be stored? Does the dispatch software have a notes field? If so, is it procedure to put that sort of information in place? Do cops have access to it? If so do they regularly look at it? If "no" to those points, how would a police force as large as Atlanta's maintain that knowledge? A lot of large organizations rely heavily on tribal knowledge, so that's a possibility. But only assuming officers always patrol/police the same areas and never quit or get fired, or if they do, they always pass on the entirety of their tribal knowledge to the successor. So again, I agree with the general sentiment, but this doesn't have to be a matter of incompetent law enforcement personnel. It could easily be a problem of lacking software and a system prohibitively large to maintain that kind of granular information among all agents.
- kazinator 11y ago
  > Where would the knowledge of this phenomena be stored? In the same place where cops record false intruder alarms and give people a warning or fine for too many.
  - blantonl 11y ago
    Good point - but there is potential incoming revenue to pay for that. In this very remote use case, I doubt CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) vendors are going to write this use case into their development plans. Unless they saw this on HN...
- manarth 11y ago
  I would hope that the police do have a systematic method of correlating incidents with addresses. Such as, say, a history of reported domestic abuse. Or homes with residents that have been threatened with doxxing or swatting. And information such as whether the resident is a recorded gun-owner. I would sincerely hope that information such as this would be available to any officer dispatched to an address.

kelvin0 11y ago

Once this is resolved, we might temporarily have a way to fool the 'illegal' surveillance gear used by law enforcement? Unless they use some completely different scheme to snoop on cell phone users?

akavel 11y ago

Given that people coming to them have their info from somewhere, there might be chance they could succeed through asking those visitors where exactly do they have the data from, and then trying to contact/file the complaint to this specific service/company/...

cubano 11y ago

You know, its not completely out of realm of the possible that these people are lying and really know much more then they are telling police. I am not implying anything about these people, but I am just saying it isn't impossible. I lived in Las Vegas for a couple of years and was involved with some people who, from the outside, seemed like very normal folk...in fact, in many ways, I was someone like that, too, due to issues I was fighting at the time. We all have a different set of experiences in our lives, and, unfortunately for me I suppose, my experiences make me think about this in a different way then many here might.

coderdude 11y ago
Based on the article that would also mean they're kidnappers and/or murderers so it might be best to avoid playing the Devil's advocate on this one.
- true_religion 11y ago
  Or... They are involved with people who steal, buy or refurbish stolen phones.
  - coderdude 11y ago
    I wish the article mentioned where all these people are coming from. If they're all local then that could lend credibility to that explanation. If they're from all over the country then that doesn't seem as likely. The thought did cross my mind.
lovemenot 11y ago
One is an engineer, the other a journalist. Maybe they or their "friends" have the skill and the motivation to hack the system, generate false positivrs to get published. Maybe this is someone trolling them, like swatting.

such_a_casual 11y ago

$1 says it's some null value. This is a good premise to an "off-by-one" parable where it turns out the neighbors are phone thieves.

BatFastard 11y ago

<sarcasm> It's the man-bun that guy is wearing. Phone's are set to hunt those guys down and beat the crap out of them.</sarcasm>

ChrisClark 11y ago
Yes, let's bully someone because of their appearance.
chad_strategic 11y ago
Man-buns are lame, but beating the crap out of them seem a little extreme for sarcasm

Splines 11y ago

My guess is that some IP-to-Geolocation service says nothing more specific than "Atlanta" and this couple happens to live in the geocenter of Atlanta.

femto113 11y ago
This is roughly my guess as well, though I'd guess a ZIP code or some similar geographical construct (ZIP3, ZCTA, etc.) rather than a city name.

sideproject 11y ago

I had a similar experience about a month ago, when I thought I lost my iPhone 5s. Logged onto "Find my iPhone" app and it told me it was about 1km away from my house. I thought I must've dropped it somewhere nearby. So I got the address from Apple Map, drove there and knocked on the door to greet a rather defensive (obviously) lady who, of course, denied ever picking up an iphone that day. I snooped around to see if there were any suspicious people around, maybe she has a wayward son who goes around and steals other people's phones. I then went to the police office nearby and asked them what I could do. They told me they can't use the GPS tracking as an evidence for a search warrant - doh! It was frustrating because the app was telling me that my phone was right there! At the back of this lady's house! At this moment, I was going through all sorts of thoughts - such as "should I break into her house at night?", "should I go back and just barge into her house and locate my phone and shout 'AH HA! I KNEW IT! YOU THIEF"! Feeling dejected, I came home, only to find my phone sitting on the top of my drawer. 2 seconds ago, I swear I thought she was the thief. Apple - you disappointed me.

GhotiFish 11y ago
out of curiosity, does it only show you a single point? Does it not show you the potential error? I'm working on a mapping app that uses GPS data and the first thing we had to address was the fact that the data we got from the GPS units in the field are not perfect, they have error, hell they report their error, and our application shows that error as part of the map data. based on the data we have gotten from mobile phones, when a phone approximates its position based on cell towers it spits out a large error. That surely is being shown, right?
- PhantomGremlin 11y ago
  Does it not show you the potential error? I often use Find My Friends to keep track of the kids. I presume its location methodology is similar to Find My iPhone. Here's how it behaves: About 10% of the time, it doesn't show a current location at all for the kid. It does remember the previous one, so it will show a location and say something like "46 minutes ago". When it does display a location, about 60% of the time it's a single spot. The remaining 30% of the time it is a spot enclosed by a tinted circle. That circle can be a few hundred feet in diameter, or it can be more than 5 miles in diameter. This is the potential error. However, I'd bet that 95% of the people looking at it don't understand the concept of "potential error". So to them, the enclosing circle doesn't exist. Edit: forgot to add, about 2% of the time it will show an "exact" location, what I called a "spot", no "potential error" circle. Then a minute later it will show a different exact location a few miles away. Then a minute later yet a third exact location another mile or two away. So in other words, about 2% of the time it is really confused (the kid is stationary the whole time).

Swannie 11y ago

What's shocking is the lack of a clear explanation by the so-called experts contacted in this article. My explanation as to what is likely happening: "Every WiFi router has a special unique number - think of it as serial number - baked into the device by the manufacturer (known as a MAC address). Manufacturers request a range of these unique numbers from the IEEE, and are never meant to duplicate them. When you connect to a WiFi router, you connect to its friendly name (SSID), but also your phone receives a part of this special unique number (BSSID address) [1]. Companies like Apple, Google, and SkyHook, record the location of WiFi routers using this unique number. When a phone or other device has a strong GPS location and a strong WiFi signal, they can fairly reliably assume that this unique number is at this specific location. However, not all manufacturers strictly follow the unique number allocation rule, as getting allocations can be a time consuming process. 999 times out of 1000, reuse of these numbers is not a big issue, and goes undetected. In this case, it is likely that the thieves are using, or are located near, a WiFi router with the same unique number as this couple. Changing this special unique number is sometimes possible on expensive enterprise grade WiFi routers by knowledgeable experts, but not possible or advisable on home routers. The couple should change their WiFi router." Yes, I have conflated a number of terms there for simplicity. For technical accuracy: WiFi router -> access point. Edit: added [1] https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/FAQ/How-is-the-BSSID-derived-from-the-Access-Point-ethernet-MAC-address https://arubanetworkskb.secure.force.com/pkb/articles/FAQ/Ho... As BSSID is != MAC address.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

tarikjn 11y ago

Changing their router or even turning it off won't necessary help. Here is a way to reproduce this issue and explain my point: if you are a thief, you could setup a GPS spoofer pointing to that house or have had your router in that house in the past so that some phones registered/verified it's MAC address to be at the house location. Now assume the thieves live in a location where they took this router with them and where there is no GPS signal or other router or cell signal, but only the thieves' router turned on. Now as soon as the thieves connect the stolen phones to their router, they will report being at the house. My bet is that this is likely an intentional attack by the thieves and that they are aware of what they are doing. There is a small chance they could have been people living in the house before or drove by to setup their spoof as it would have been much easier than getting their hands on a GPS spoofer.

adevine 11y ago

If I were them, I would try a non-technical (or at least mitigation) strategy: put a sign in their yard or on their front door that says "Sorry, we don't have your iPhone" and a description of the problem and screengrabs/URLs of articles like this.

jrochkind1 11y ago

> Lekei said by email that the couple’s router could be causing the problem; if misconfigured, it could be broadcasting that it’s a different location than it actually is Wait, what? Is my router broadcasting a location to someone? What technology is this, and how do I make sure my router isn't doing it?

barrkel 11y ago
http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-google-and-everyone-else-gets-wi-fi-location-data/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/how-google-and-everyone-else-ge...

mdip 11y ago

Based on my experience with a few phones I own, there's a few things that could be happening here: It was mentioned the "SSID"/MAC address problem. It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID and are encountering a MAC address collision (assuming MAC address is always taken into account, which I'm not sure that it is). Their router is likely part of some database that the GPS uses when the phones enter an area with WiFi but no cellular service or line of sight to the satellites. I had a similar failure every time I went indoors to an archery facility I visited weekly for three months. Both my wife's and my phone would think we were a clear 30 miles away in another city the second we got far enough into the building to lose cellular service. I dug into it and discovered it was using WiFi APs to get location. I think the archery place has another location in that other spot, so it's possible they swapped WiFi gear at some point, but it's anyone's guess. Another possibility, hinted at in the article, is that there's no other location data available to the stolen phone (no mapped WiFi, no cellular service) but it has an IP address so the devices are falling back to Geo IP which is extremely inaccurate (my IP address changed recently and I am now a Canadian according to location services on my PCs with no GPS capabilities -- 200 miles off). It could be a circumstance of "that IP isn't known, but that block is owned by x ISP and here's a general location of where that is ... only the little dot happens to land on their house. It would be really smart for apps that track location for theft purposes to keep a reasonable history. If it's a mobile phone, the last known high-accuracy reading from the GPS should be presented along with lower accuracy results to help in situations like this. I'd imagine it wouldn't be terribly difficult to correlate several readings over a period of time and discard ones that are clearly not sane (as would have been the case with my phone in the archery place). A bonus would be to perform other actions when the device is marked "stolen", like take photos at certain intervals and upload them to the cloud to make it easier to "prove" your phone is in the hands of someone it shouldn't be (one of the tools I had did something like this).

egypturnash 11y ago
> It's possible that they have a home router with its default SSID The guy is an engineer. I'm pretty sure their SSID has a silly in-jokey name.

strathmeyer 11y ago

Why do they keep answering the door?

kagamine 11y ago
Eugine Ionescu probably has the answer to that. You see, when the doorbell rings it means that there is somebody there waiting for the door to be opened. But not always.

incompatible 11y ago

"Avast’s software kept tracking the phones after the other programs were cleared with a factory reset" Does anyone know how that works?

lenomad 11y ago
It should work only for those phones which came with Avast factory installed. After you do a factory reset and turn on phone, they send an SMS to contact their server. This gives them the phone number which can then be used by the server to send remote commands to the phone. One of my phones had McAfee pre-installed with a similar setup. If you do a factory reset and they find that it is a different phone number now, the phone locks down (You can enter a pin to unlock). You can't even access the bootloader or do another factory reset.
- cwilkes 11y ago
  A phone had McAfee on it? I can't imagine how slow and painful it was to use that.

qume 11y ago

If this community can't pin point the problem together, then there is something up here. Clearly this warrants Google, Apple, the telcos and someone from an electronic forensic team each putting a part time expert into a team to figure this out for everyones benefit - themselves and this couple. Of course the reality is that key Google and Apple staff know exactly what has caused this and don't have a ready solution so are keeping quiet. In any case, if there are Google or Apple employees reading, perhaps you can suggest this idea to someone internally in the chance there may be some progress before someone innocent gets killed for 'stealing' a phone.

etingel 11y ago

The problem is likely that the location where these phones are really at is near the WiFi router that used to be at this address. No amount of messing with their router will help with fixing this, since those phones aren't there to begin with. The couple might have better luck hitting up the previous tenants/owners. Based on this line from the article, I'm almost certain that this is the real answer: > It started the first month that Christina Lee and Michael Saba started living together.

tlrobinson 11y ago

I wonder how easy it would be to spoof the location of a device with WiFi gear that can broadcast multiple arbitrary BSSIDs?

trunnell 11y ago

How about GPS spoofing? There's a claim that it's been done before [1]. Maybe a criminal organization has the resources to build a GPS spoofing device that's used in their "holding facility" before they root the phone? Can anyone with RF or GPS experience guess the difficulty? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid...

dghughes 11y ago

A teen in Canada tracked his lost cellphone to a home and was killed trying to get it back. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jeremy-cook-18-killed-after-tracking-down-lost-phone-in-london-ont-1.3114847 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jeremy-cook-18-killed-...

plasticchris 11y ago

I had something similar happen when I was in college visiting a friend and the police show up asking who dialed 911, if she was alone, etc. This was before ssid based geolocation become popular. I had to spend some time explaining how inaccurate cell tower positioning is, most people just assume that if the cops say it came from inside the house it must have.

wahsd 11y ago

This is just a hunch, but does anyone know whether there is any connection / shared services between the phone finding system and the iMessage airline flight tracking system? It may just all be coincidence, but that flight tracking feature is so wonky and jacked, giving false locations, legs, flights, and information on the regular. I am surprised it hasn't caused a massive outcry for just how horrible it is. It kind of makes me wonder whether there is some shared service or database or something because the flight lookup feature just smells of the same kind of failure. I realize, most people don't know/recall that iMessage will auto-link flight numbers. Just message the full flight number.

IvyMike 11y ago

It would be fascinating for someone to log into their Google Location History and see where the phone was right before it was at this house. It might provide a clue. https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0 https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/0

veb 11y ago
Thanks for sharing this link, I had no idea Google had your location history so nicely accessible like this. I knew they kept track, but never once did it occur to me that I could see it.

mangeletti 11y ago

I didn't finish the entire article, but my immediate thought was that this has something to do with these new phone drop spots that I've seen at grocery stores. You apparently can just put a phone in one of these ATM-like machines and get money out, which immediately struck me as a clever way to buy stolen phones on the cheap from criminals, with indemnity... which would definitely lead to situations like this when those stolen phones are resold to unsuspecting consumers.

DigitalSea 11y ago

I know it is an inconvenience, but couldn't they just maybe get a new router and see if that fixes the problem? Surely a cheap router is better than getting your house ransacked by police?

pawelk 11y ago
It won't make any difference if it's caused by some random router being correlated with their physical address. Phones connecting to that router will still be reported as being located near the house, even if the family cut off electricity and wrapped the house in a Faraday cage.

jbb555 11y ago

I looked on https://maps.google.com/locationhistory https://maps.google.com/locationhistory at what google think my location is. Usually it's pretty accurate. But several times a year there are major anomalies For example showing me traveling the 4 miles to work in London via a quick journey to Oslo. It's pretty reliable but not 100%

ucho 11y ago

Ignoring everything else - if it the phone that went missing, should the location at least be accurate to nearest base station. In case of missing child operator would provide triangulation results, right?

TuringTest 11y ago

There is an obvious and simple solution to this problem; although it's not up to this couple to implement it, but to all the developers building or using geo-location. This is a problem caused by incorrect data representation. Everything the companies know about the location of the phones is an imprecise area, yet they are representing it with this: [1] This absurdly precise representation doesn't convey the error margins of the information available, and it's what's convincing people that this couple's home is the point that they're looking for. The mapping companies are misleading their users by hiding the level of confidence about the information provided. Please all front-end developers, don't use a map pin to represent a place in the map if you don't know their coordinates or exact address. A circle with a radius proportional to the uncertainty area is the best representation in that case. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=icon+map+pin&biw=790&bih=750&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&tbm=isch&tbs=isz:i https://www.google.com/search?q=icon+map+pin&biw=790&bih=750...