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Overly precise coordinates after Did You Feel It report

Open vinceq-usgs opened this issue 5 years ago • 0 comments

Truncate the output of the geolocation service to 3 decimal places (for privacy)

From user comment: After I filled out https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/uw61535372/tellus I was treated to a summary of the earthquake, including its latitude and longitude. It looked like there were at least nine decimal digits, and there's no way possible that you have sub-millimeter (and unlikely centimeter at seven digits) accuracy for the epicenter or for my location (I don't remember which it was). The coordinates should be truncated or rounded to fewer digits (e.g. five for one meter for residence, fewer for epicenter).

See also: https://xkcd.com/2170/

vinceq-usgs avatar Jul 15 '19 17:07 vinceq-usgs