How can your approximate location be found using WiFi SSIDs?
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When your phone connects to the GPS satellites, it also periodically takes a snapshot of any wireless networks that it can see nearby. The company that creates your phone’s OS (Apple/Google) keeps a database of this information so that it basically knows the physical location of every publicly available wireless network (based on the unique MAC address of each access point). So when your phone tries to find its location and it can’t get a good GPS signal, it will instead compare what wireless networks it can see against that database, and it will determine your location based on that instead.
If you ever move and take your wireless router with you, you might notice that your phone will incorrectly report your location as your old address for a while when you’re at home, until the database gets a chance to update with the new location for your wireless network.
FYI, if you want to opt your own wireless network out of this location database, you can append “_nomap” to the end of your SSID. I know that Google will respect this, I’m not sure if Apple or anyone else does though.
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