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CRIMINAL HIDEOUT
John and his mother Ann are ordinary people with ordinary jobs. As far as they knew, no criminal activity had ever taken place at their home. And yet they regularly had strangers turning up at their Pretoria home, accusing them of stealing laptops and phones. The indignant visitors even had evidence: a map on their device had tracked the stolen goods to their location. Once, a family came looking for a missing relative. They’d even been raided by the police, who were looking for stolen laptops, a fugitive and a kidnapping victim. At one point, their house was searched seven times in one month.
When John was threatened with legal action after a business accused them of online harassment, he’d had enough.
A friend put him in contact with Professor Martin Olivier, a professor of computer science at the University of Pretoria. After some digging, Prof Olivier came to a startling conclusion: John and Ann were victims of bad digital mapping.
When a company has to determine where in the world a smart device is being used, they use digital mapping, which is based on the user’s IP address. If your device connects to the internet, it has an IP address. But IP mapping is harder
