This was also the result of geolocation by MaxMind. Since 2012, a family in Pretoria, South Africa, has been regularly visited by police or angry private citizens who believed their stolen phones were to be found in the family's backyard.
If geolocation software maps IP addresses associated with an entire county or territory to a particular location, such as the geographic center of the territory, this can cause considerable problems for the people who happen to live there, as law enforcement authorities and others may mistakenly assume any crimes or other misconduct associated with the IP address to originate from that particular location.įor example, a farmstead northeast of Potwin, Kansas became the default site of 600 million IP addresses when the Massachusetts-based digital mapping company MaxMind changed the putative geographic center of the contiguous United States from 39.8333333,-98.585522 to 38.0000,-97.0000. Utilizing third-party tests conducted by reputable organizations.Statistical analysis of user submitted data.Data scrubbing to filter out or identify anomalies.Analysis of linguistic data from the device, using pretrained models that show that some term is frequently mentioned in a certain location (e.g.Network routing information collected to the end point of the IP address.Guesstimates from adjacent Class C range and/or gleaned from network hops.Data contributed by Internet service providers.Pairing a user's IP address with the GPS location of a device that's using such an IP address.
An alternative to hosting and querying a database is to obtain the country code for a given IP address through a DNSBL-style lookup from a remote server. These databases typically contain IP address data which may be used in firewalls, ad servers, routing, mail systems, web sites, and other automated systems where a geolocation may be useful.
There are a number of free and paid subscription geolocation databases, ranging from country level to state or city-including ZIP/ post code level-each with varying claims of accuracy (generally higher at the country level). The protocol specifies that each IP packet must have a header which contains, among other things, the IP address of the sender. computer, printer) participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address is assigned to each device (e.g.