How does Google know that this exact tiny restaurant on the 4th floor of a building full of other restaurants and cafes is “usually busy at 8pm on Wednesday”?
In: 70
A phone doesn’t just use GPS, but a process called assisted GPS.
Regular GPS triangulates your location by the time it takes the signal from multiple satellites to reach your phone. Assisted GPS also allows your location to be triangulated due to the time it takes signals from cell towers, wifi routers, and Bluetooth enabled devices to reach your phone. It knows the time it takes for a signal to get there because the packets coming from the signals are timestamped at very high precision and devices synchronize to a time service that uses an atomic clock.
This combination gives accurate locations in 3D even while indoors, assuming that there are enough signals that your phone picks up from the systems mentioned above. The less signals, the less accurate the triangulation.
Then once the location data goes back to google they can compare it to the information they have about the business’ location and get an approximation of when the most people are there.
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