![]() I worked from home today because of the "Snowzilla" blizzard on the US East Coast, and left home twice to go to the library and run one errand, but my location history shows me being up to a mile further away from home than any of the locations which I visited. In the end, the fact is that the location-tracking systems available on consumer devices today are not that accurate. Here's one extreme example that I just read about: People keep going to this home looking for their lost phones and nobody knows why. I don't know exactly how far away this snapping can happen, but I have seen it make some pretty bad guesses. ![]() Even if you do have a good GPS signal, Google will sometimes "snap" your location to a nearby "point of interest" if you drive by.That means that the numbers could be up to that far off if they only came from cell tower data. The effective range of a cell phone tower could be anything between 1 and 45 miles, depending on how dense your area is. If your device is trying to locate itself by searching for nearby cellphone towers, it could determine that it is anywhere in a large area in which those towers can be detected.However, that means that if someone from a particular area moved into your area and Google has not updated their database, then Google's database will think that you are in the area where that person's WiFi network used to be. ![]() If your device is trying to locate itself using WiFi networks (now called "WiFi Positioning System" or "WiPS" for short), it looks for nearby WiFi networks that Google knows about and then uses the locations that Google has on record for those networks as a way to determine your approximate location.Each of those methods has problems, some of which are discussed below. ![]()
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