Kansas family sues company that linked them to child pornography and internet scams
The Arnold family was falsely accused of internet scams, harbouring runaways, and producing child pornography for five years
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Your support makes all the difference.The police knocked on their doors expecting hackers, car thieves, and child abusers – but they were greeted by the Arnold family, victims of a major tech glitch that put them through a “digital hell” for half a decade.
James and Theresa Arnold are suing the digital mapping company MaxMind, according to filings in a US district court in Kansas, for years of misery. The complaint says the couple’s daily life has been constantly disrupted by police officers, angry business owners, and other people accusing them of carrying out internet scams.
Yet, the befuddled family had done nothing of the sort. It appeared that MaxMind’s mapping database had pinpointed the Potwin, Kansas, farm as the location of more than 600 million IP addresses.
“The plaintiffs were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state, or federal official looking for a runaway child or a missing person or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide,” the court documents read.
In a number of instances, the lawsuit says, the Arnolds were accused of harbouring children to make child pornography.
“My clients have been through digital hell. The most vile accusations have been made against them – such as that they’ve been involved in child pornography,” Randall Rathburn, the Arnolds’ attorney, told The Guardian. “What impact would it have on your life if someone accused you of being in child pornography? Obviously it’s horrendous.”
Modern technological gadgets that connect to the Internet – such as laptops and smartphones – use IP (internet protocol) addresses. But the IP address is not necessarily unique to an individual. It can span across a network, making the precise geography impossible to determine.
The problem apparently arose when MaxMind assigned arbitrary co-ordinates to all those unlocated IP addresses - millions in all – that just so happened to land in the front yard of the Arnold farm, according to the Washington Post.
The issue went all the way back to 2002, resulting in similar disturbances to previous tenants of the farm.
MaxMind has reportedly fixed the error – moving the co-ordinates to the centre of a lake near Wichita – but it remains unclear whether or not that will give the Arnolds any peace and quiet in the future.
Mr Rathburn added that police had paid visits to the home through July and “there’s been no indication on our end that things have changed."