On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 3:09 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
So really, what is needed is two additional fields for the lat/lon of laterr/lonerr so that, for example, instead of just 38.0/-97.0, you would get 38.0±2/-97.0±10 or something like that.
It does seem needed to the geo location companies too, at least several of them provide this - and it's been this way for a long time. I didn't remember if Maxmind does or not, so I just checked. From some of their documentation, the field "accuracy_radius" is returned which is "The radius in kilometers around the specified location where the IP address is likely to be." See http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/geoip2/web-services/#location . I don't think it's in their free stuff (you get what you pay for, it seems). It doesn't show up on their web interface to "try" the service nor does it give a warning that these things can be wrong, but IMHO probably wouldn't be a bad idea to say "Don't go show up at this address - it might not be right!"