How in the world is this not a valid reason to sue? This private company's faulty data has led to a ton of stressful interaction with all kinds of Law Enforcement who bang on their doors for everything from a stolen iPhone to kidnapping and exploitation.
I don't think a settlement is out of the question here, frankly I think $75k is incredibly reasonable.
$75K is merely the minimum in damages required to sue in Federal Court; see page 2 of their complaint, #3: "This action involves a dispute between citizens of different states and the amount in controversy is in excess of $75,000. Accordingly this Court's jurisdiction is invoked under 28 USC § 1332...."
See e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1332# for that bit of law, this is what's required to literally make it a Federal case. We can be quite sure they'll be asking for more in due course, if the case gets anywhere (it takes some effort e.g. $$ to lawyers to establish specific damages to a court's satisfaction).
> $75K is merely the minimum in damages required to sue in Federal Court;
Strictly speaking, $75K is the minimum amount in controversy required for federal courts to exercise diversity jurisdiction (where the requisite diversity of citizenship exists); other routes to federal jurisdiction (particularly, federal question jurisdiction) to which such a minimum does not apply.
Yeah, in fact, the amount seems calculated to elicit a response along the lines of the following: "Wait. Are you sure it's only 3 zeros? Hell, write them a check and be done with it."
I'm not sure the company really did anything wrong here. They can't check every area center for not being someone's house or somewhere else problematic. But this case is a particular outlier and the amount requested is petty cash levels--unless they worry about setting a precedent.
> 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.
