I haven’t had my gps turned ON for a couple of weeks atleast and still whenever I search for the weather, I get to know the weather of my exact location. None of my devices have their gps activated and yet theyre able to get my location. How is that?
In: Technology
You’re still connected to the cell network and probably also Wi-fi. Either one or both of those can also tell Google where you are.
For landline your IP adress will give away your ISP, which is usually accurate enough to know which city are you from.
Google also remembers your last location, so if you already googled weather with some location info on (Wifi connected to landline, GPS on or something) it will use last known data.
WiFi routers broadcast a unique number called a MAC address. Android phones listen for MACs nearby them and send their approximate GPS location to Google.
When another phone comes by without GPS enabled, it’ll see what networks are in range, and ask Google where those are located. This technique was invented by a company called Skyhook and debuted with the original iPhone.
GPS is going to be the most accurate at determining your location, since that’s the whole point of it. It’ll tell you exactly what spot your standing to within a couple meters.
But your phone in order to use the Internet either needs to connect to a cell tower, or to the internet over wifi. If it’s over a cellular network, your phone will be in communication with the nearest cell tower, which in turn knows where it is. Considering your looking for weather in your town and not the exact geographic location your standing at, that’s close enough for it to figure out where you are. Multiple cell towers could be used to triangulate your position, but for weather that’s far from needed.
Wifi works similarly. When you connect to a WiFi router, it has an address saying where it is, generally. This won’t be precise to your house, but it can be as precise as your general neighborhood. This would be good enough to tell you the weather.
I’m curious, why do have your GPS off on everything?
Your cellphone can identify your position in a variety of different ways
GPS is one
Another is you can triangulate your position with cell towers. Since the towers are at fixed locations, if you know how far away you are (which is easy to tell all you need is the current time) for 2 or more towers you can get a reasonably close fix on where you are.
The Google Earth survey also records the names of various wifi networks around a city. If you are within range of one Google can look it up in it’s database and identify your location that way.
It can also check your IP address. IP addresses belong to ISPs and are typically assigned geographically.
The location is derived from your wi-fi MAC address (a unique id of every wi-fi router), your IP address, and the ids of cell towers around you. When you GPS was on in the past Google recorded what was your wi-fi MAC address, your IP, and the ids of cell towers around you. Now even if GPS is not on they know the MAC, the IP, and the cell towers are associated with your location.
WiFi is a pretty big teller – wireless routers and access points are almost always in a fixed location and don’t move. They also have what’s known as a MAC address, a unique 12 character ID that identifies that piece of hardware.
Phones are capable of recording wireless networks they see (both the name of the network and the MAC address), as well as their GPS coordinates. Companies use this information to build a massive database of wireless networks and their exact location. One such database is WiGLE, which is basically a map of wireless networks. Even if your phone has GPS disabled, if it sees a wireless router or AP with a known MAC address and location, it can determine it’s approximate location.
Cellular signal triangulation is another method – signals from cell towers travel a fixed, well known speed and the towers are also in a fixed position. So your phone can measure the time it takes for a signal to make a “round trip” to the tower (the phone sends a piece of data and waits for a reply), and it’ll be able to figure out how far from the tower it is. If your phone is in range of two towers, then it can figure out the distance to both towers and there’s only two potential spots where those exact distances would overlap. If you’re in range of three or more towers, then there’s only one potential spot where all three signals would overlap with those timings, giving a fairly precise location.
In short, since the location of every cell phone tower and nearly every wireless network is known, your phone can determine its location based on what towers and wireless networks it’s able to see.
Your cell phone is receiving service from a provider. That service is broadcast from towers. Given the latency of the response time of your phone, the tower can estimate how far away you are. The provider has towers everywhere, and if they get a latency response reading on your phone from three of their towers, they can “triangulate” your position with some simple math.
The IP address you use to connect to the internet has a physical location – either a wi-fi connection or a cell tower location. Google will know where you are based on your IP address. Connect with a VPN and Google will think you’re in whatever location the VPN exit node is located.
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