I just bought a new smartphone (my first ever). I clicked on google maps and was horrified to see that within TWO SECONDS it had registered my EXACT location, then popped up a message - something like "connect to WiFi for better accuracy". Better?
Understand how location tracking works. The Google library uses a Kalman filter with different location sources to estimate your true location using many sources all with a known error profile. Every source you add, even ones that are less accurate, help to reduce the aggregate error in your location estimate. It is a statistical calculation.
And yes, WiFi can give better accuracy than GPS:
Whenever you turn on Google Location services, a map of all WiFi hotspots is constantly being transmitted back to Google along with your calculated location using all available sources. Google stores all this information and over time generates a map of every WiFi hotspot throughout the world. Because of the huge number of samples they have from many different devices, they can geolocate a hotspot very precisely. With these hotspot location maps, they can triangulate anyone's position, often times more accurately than GPS.
I just bought a new smartphone (my first ever). I clicked on google maps and was horrified to see that within TWO SECONDS it had registered my EXACT location, then popped up a message - something like "connect to WiFi for better accuracy". Better?
Yeah, the map function opens your location services, generally. You can play around with the settings and probably turn that off, if you care.
Understand how location tracking works. The Google library uses a Kalman filter with different location sources to estimate your true location using many sources all with a known error profile. Every source you add, even ones that are less accurate, help to reduce the aggregate error in your location estimate. It is a statistical calculation.
And yes, WiFi can give better accuracy than GPS:
Whenever you turn on Google Location services, a map of all WiFi hotspots is constantly being transmitted back to Google along with your calculated location using all available sources. Google stores all this information and over time generates a map of every WiFi hotspot throughout the world. Because of the huge number of samples they have from many different devices, they can geolocate a hotspot very precisely. With these hotspot location maps, they can triangulate anyone's position, often times more accurately than GPS.