“Your house is a crime scene and you two are persons of interest"

January 22, 2016 8:13 AM

Why do people keep coming to this couple’s home looking for lost phones? Lost mobile phones are reporting that they're at a suburban Atlanta address, but they're not there. "The missing phones don’t seem to have anything in common. Some are iPhones. Some are Androids. They’re on different carriers: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Boost Mobile."
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage (36 comments total)

What really strikes me about this is a simple question: is there even any legal basis for a "find my phone" app giving the police cause to search anywhere?
posted by tocts at 8:21 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Oh man, Christina's an acquaintance of mine. She's one of the smartest, most conscientious people I know and it sucks that this is happening to her and her dude.
posted by Maaik at 8:25 AM on January 22, 2016 [5 favorites]

It has to be bad data in the WiFi SSID or cellphone tower mapping database the phones are using. it's the simplest explanation.

The article doesn't really explain it, but companies (Skyhook is the biggest player) just drive around and record where each WiFi network is located. So, if your WiFi SSID is something the clever and original "FBI SURVEILLANCE VAN", Skyhook has driven by your house and recorded you network name and it's location. Then Android/iOS make use of the database, and when your phone connects to the "FBI SURVEILLANCE VAN" it just tells you the location in that database, no GPS is involved.

The same thing happens with cellphone towers. There was an NBA team (maybe the Cavs) that trucked around their own cellphone tower when they went on the road. This caused the phones of people in the stands who connected to this tower to think they were located in Cleveland, and not Houston or wherever the game was taking place.
posted by sideshow at 8:27 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

What really strikes me about this is a simple question: is there even any legal basis for a "find my phone" app giving the police cause to search anywhere?

Why would it be any different than an eyewitness report? With missing person, if someone goes to the police station and says, hey I saw someone who matches that description going into such and such address, that'd be enough to at least prompt the police to check it out, maybe enough for a warrant, I'd think.
posted by Diablevert at 8:27 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Someone in the comments of the article mentioned this, but replacing the WiFi access point with a brand new one would likely solve their issue.
posted by sideshow at 8:28 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Why would it be any different than an eyewitness report?

It would be different because there's literally no regulation of these apps, nor any kind of transparency as to how they're making a determination of location. "I saw a person at this address" is very different from "I have an app I got for free that I know nothing about that's telling me someone is totally at this address".
posted by tocts at 8:31 AM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

I live in Utah and several times my phone has mistakenly reported my location as somewhere in Atlanta. I wonder if it was their house...
posted by mmoncur at 8:32 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Don't see how, really. There's no regulation of people that prevents them from making a false report or simply being mistaken. The inherent fail safe is the assumption that the vast majority of people wouldn't lie to the police because they wouldn't want to get in trouble. Dunno that that's any more or less reasonable of an assumption to make about Google or Apple or Verizon.
posted by Diablevert at 8:37 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

"I live in Utah and several times my phone has mistakenly reported my location as somewhere in Atlanta. I wonder if it was their house..."

Who's your cell phone carrier? That might be their default location fallback for when gps or other location finding methods fail.
posted by I-baLL at 8:38 AM on January 22, 2016

"Someone in the comments of the article mentioned this, but replacing the WiFi access point with a brand new one would likely solve their issue."

Yeah, or maybe even just changing the network's name. Restarting the router and changing the frequency, like the couple has already done, won't help.
posted by I-baLL at 8:39 AM on January 22, 2016

So, if your WiFi SSID is something the clever and original "FBI SURVEILLANCE VAN", Skyhook has driven by your house and recorded you network name and it's location.

I assume that those companies are also recording the MAC address of the AP, which works better for identification purposes since it's tied to the hardware (though of course can still be faked).
posted by anifinder at 8:44 AM on January 22, 2016 [7 favorites]

They probably have a stingray device out on the power pole, by the house.
posted by Oyéah at 8:48 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Changing AP will help eventually, when the mapping is updated. Maybe.

If you are scanning for APs there is no data that will ever conclusively mean "that mac no longer maps to this location".

I bet they'd get better results giving the AP to someone they hate.
posted by idiopath at 8:48 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Why would it be any different than an eyewitness report?

Because it's a computer spitting out some data in an automated fashion and not a human witness who can be interviewed and cross-examined. There is actually a huge body of law about what kinds of leads can provide the police with "probable cause," "reasonable suspicion," or whatever the specific standard is for conducting the search, detention, etc., in question.

Here is a somewhat recent (in Fourth-amendment-jurisprudence terms; it's 2+ years old) article about the development of this case law. Bottom line is that it's not stupid to think that an automated report might provide probable cause / reasonable suspicion, but it is by no means "all basically the same" as a tip from a real live person.
posted by Joey Buttafoucault at 9:19 AM on January 22, 2016 [10 favorites]

I remember hearing either this or a near-identical story perhaps 3-4 years ago. I'm surprised there hasn't been an effective fix yet.

Here's one such story from 2012.

Here's the one I was thinking about, from my home-town in 2013: LVRJ.
posted by mystyk at 9:24 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Kill your television phone.
posted by moink at 9:31 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Wait, isn't Boost an MVNO? That would make sense then.
posted by Samizdata at 9:46 AM on January 22, 2016

A message on Ars Technica gave a possible explanation:

What's probably happening is that GPS coordinates for these "lost" phones is bad, and the mapping program is throwing up its hands and pointing them to the default location for that zip code, which is unfortunately on top of this address.
posted by ShooBoo at 10:15 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

"The call is coming from inside that house over there in Atlanta!"
posted by notyou at 10:22 AM on January 22, 2016 [7 favorites]

There was a police standoff across from where my office is yesterday so I had the police scanner going and the standoff was pretty boring but during the downtime a mother called in and said her daughter was kidnapped and she was outside the house. So the dispatch was relaying the message to the responding officer.

Officer: How does she know the daughter is inside?
Dispatch: She's pinging her daughter's phone.
O: Pinging her phone?
D: Yes she said earlier it was pinging at school but now it's pinging from inside the residence.
O: How is she pinging the phone?
D: She says it's an app on her phone.
(at this point another dispatch comes on the line)
D2: Just verified with school that daughter is in class.
O: What's that?
D: School verified daughter in class on campus.
O: Okay.
D: I will notify the mother.

So, yeah, don't trust the "pinging" apps.
posted by M Edward at 10:25 AM on January 22, 2016 [15 favorites]

I'm told that here in New Zealand police no longer follow up on "find my device" information, because so many turned out to be wrong.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:25 AM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

So a year or two ago, I had such an app on my phone.

I lost my phone.

I used the app. It told me that the phone was a few blocks away from my house. This wasn't implausible. I was pretty sure I had dropped it while loading up my car at the supermarket a couple of kilometres away, so maybe someone local had found it.

Doorknocked the house where it showed up, and the houses either side. Some embarassing conversations, no phone.

MONTHS later I was cleaning my car, and I found the phone under a floormat. The whole time I was pinging it, it was in my car, in my garage, out of home Wifi range and with shitty GPS. Meanwhile, my company had paid for a replacement.

Oops.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 10:29 AM on January 22, 2016 [8 favorites]

"out of home Wifi range and with shitty GPS"

It wasn't shitty GPS. It just couldn't get a GPS signal from inside a car. under the mat, so it tried to guess it's location from the nearest cell tower which is accurate to an area of about 300 meters, if I remember correctly.
posted by I-baLL at 10:33 AM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

I'm convinced on an instinctive level, without being troubled by anything like knowledge or facts, that this is some kind of unusual but re-occuring default value coming up because of a programming error - i.e. if you convert "error - location not found" into ASCII values, then push those numbers into software that is meant to interpret the output of a GPS lookup, you get the co-ordinates of their house.

Maaik - if you know Christina well enough, and they're getting a lot of hassle, I'd be tempted to recommend this as an interesting problem to give to a CompSci class at a local University...
posted by DancingYear at 10:46 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

What's probably happening is that GPS coordinates for these "lost" phones is bad, and the mapping program is throwing up its hands and pointing them to the default location for that zip code, which is unfortunately on top of this address.

This happens when processing addresses with ESRI GIS products. When they know you're in a certain polygon, but not exactly where inside the polygon, they go with the centroid of that polygon. It's the least-wrong guess you could make given the information you have. So I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of behavior were more widespread than just ESRI's stuff.

With addresses, the polygons they use are defined by ZIP codes. But the phone probably isn't starting with an address, so ZIP codes aren't necessarily the relevant polygons being used.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 11:12 AM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

"out of home Wifi range and with shitty GPS"

It wasn't shitty GPS. It just couldn't get a GPS signal from inside a car. under the mat, so it tried to guess it's location from the nearest cell tower which is accurate to an area of about 300 meters, if I remember correctly.

Unless you created the GPS spec and feel this comment is impugning your honor or something, this is a super tedious hair to split.
posted by cnelson at 11:33 AM on January 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

Uhm, what? I'm pointing out that the phone wasn't using GPS to find its location which is why it was off by so much. It has nothing to do with the GPS spec. I don't understand how explaining something, so people better understand what's going on, is splitting hairs.
posted by I-baLL at 11:53 AM on January 22, 2016 [13 favorites]

...during the downtime a mother called in and said her daughter was kidnapped and she was outside the house...
...School verified daughter in class on campus...

This is a pretty great example of precisely why these apps are significantly different from eyewitness testimony. I feel like it's only a matter of time before someone gets killed due to one of these things -- either by police no-knock warrant (with the usual "shoot first, ask questions later" approach), or some paranoid parent who bursts into a house with a weapon because their kid didn't come home on time.
posted by tocts at 12:03 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Didn't someone on here have a story about this happening to them constantly? I remember it pretty clearly from 2-3 years ago, and it ended with someone trying to actually shove their way into the house.

I've noticed in seattle, with apples inbuilt share location with friends/find my iphone functions that there's several default location blips. If you know what the interface is supposed to look like and zoom out you'll see a gigantic blue ring showing that it could be anywhere in that area. But the ring is so large you have to zoom out to actually see it, so it looks like there's just a dot going "It's right here!". And if it can't get a good GPS signal, the dot wont ever move.

I can see how it would be easy for people to misinterpret the confusing, poorly designed interface(the area inside the ring is VERY lightly shaded, and the edge can't be seen at the default zoom level!) and think "my phone is RIGHT THERE".

And yea, the dot lands on a house. Every time. Very rarely it centers midway into a lake, but mostly on a couple different houses depending on the area of town.

I feel really bad for the people who live in those houses.
posted by emptythought at 12:21 PM on January 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

I wonder if one could work something special out about that neighbourhood from the OpenCellID tower database, or the (huge) Mozilla Location Service tables.
posted by scruss at 1:22 PM on January 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

> There was an NBA team (maybe the Cavs) that trucked around their own cellphone tower when they went on the road

Behold the COW (Cell on Wheels). It's purpose is to be moved to a location where cell capacity must temporarily be increased. Stadiums are very common locations for COWs, though it never occurred to me that a COW might travel with the team. I've seen one at Seattle's Key Arena during sold-out concerts. Concertgoers gotta upload pics and video to the cloud, or they'll die or something.
posted by Sunburnt at 3:43 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Did Christina used to date anyone in the computer engineering program in college?
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 5:07 PM on January 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Would replacing their AP really do the trick, though? I mean, if Skyhook's database says "A certain AP with this MAC lives (at Lee & Saba's address) in Atlanta", and that database is rarely/never updated, replacing Lee & Saba's AP with a new/different model wouldn't matter, would it? Even if whoever has that old AP packs up and moves to New York, any "lost" phone that connects to it and uses Skyhook's database to report its location is going to say it's in Atlanta, wouldn't it?
posted by xedrik at 8:41 PM on January 22, 2016

It's probably not stale database entries. The databases are updated continuously, by the field devices themselves. That phone you're carrying around is doing network surveying, not just querying.

It probably isn't getting a wifi fix at all and so is falling back to much more approximate cell or even GeoIP-based lookups. Cell networks and IP networks have irregular, quasi-hierarchical structure -- MCC / MNCs and routing prefixes / ASNs, respectively -- and they carve America up into weird-shaped chunks* when you draw them on maps. Geocoding calculations are done by taking bounding boxes, rectangles that include the weird-shaped region of interest, and then returning the center of the box. This poor couple probably just lives at the center of a bounding box for one of those chunks.

I mean, if it's a stolen phone the thief is probably doing some amount of mucking with the phone to disable find-my-phone systems (turn off GPS, wifi, swap SIM, etc.) so it's not surprising if the phone's getting a lousy fix in that context. What you're supposed to do in the software is check the returned accuracy of a fix and show not-very-certain results to the user (or no location at all) if the fix accuracy is lousy. At least some layer of the software usually knows when it's making a bad approximation; but that fact can get lost or obscured as the fix works its way back up to the surface of a program that a user is looking at.

* The cell system actually describes USA as multiple "countries", each with their own geographic center, because it ran out of sub-network identifiers. True story!
posted by ead at 9:02 AM on January 26, 2016

It might help smooth future confrontations if they kept a printout of this article posted on their front door, so people at least see the headline before they start knocking.
posted by homunculus at 11:52 AM on February 1, 2016

"Why lost phones keep pointing at this Atlanta couple’s home"

Maynor suspected the phones leading to Saba and Lee’s house might be deprived of GPS and cell tower triangulation, and so might be relying on IP address to figure out where they were, given that this particular area is low on wifi networks. “But looking at the IP address is not very specific; it’s just supposed to tell you whether the phone is in Atlanta or Zimbabwe,” said Maynor.

So he and a former colleague, Rob Graham, went looking through the public database of Maxmind, a location providing company, which is known to have one of the biggest maps of IP addresses and so is used by lots of different companies—and possibly by whatever geolocation app the visitors to Lee and Saba’s house were using to find their phones.

It turns out that, for the zip code that covers the region next to Lee and Saba’s house, the latitude/longitude result that Maxmind returns is just 1000 feet away from their home.

“If someone turns on a phone miles away in the same zip code in a building without a clear line to GPS and not a lot of Wifi addresses, it’ll look like it’s in the spot Maxmind points to [very near Lee and Saba’s house],” said Maynor. As all of the people who have showed up at the house have been from the Atlanta area, this is plausible.

Maxmind founder and CEO Thomas Mather says his company advises against using IP geolocation data to pinpoint the location of a smartphone because it’s not precise enough.

[...]

Maynor thinks it’s possible that an app seeking to better locate a phone might take the IP-based location and then look next to a mapping database of wireless devices it knows in the area; with little to choose from there, it may be locking onto Lee and Saba’s router as the closest to the IP-chosen location and then pinpoint them as the exact location of the phone.

But he’s still uncertain. Maynor says he feels like Sherlock Holmes trying to solve this tech mystery.

posted by jjwiseman at 1:14 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]