Darryl E. Clarke

Firefox 3.5 added support for “My Location”; Google Maps added a feature “Show My Location.”

One random day I thought I’d try it out and see how well it does. I’m only using a laptop with no real GPS technology built in.  I have a phone, but it doesn’t support anything fancy. It’s just a phone.

When I first clicked the “Show My Location” circle on Google maps, Firefox was kind enough to ask me if it was OK for Google to know this. I said yes, because I wanted to know.  To my surprise, awe, and WTF? It had my location closer than I could have ever imagined.

I was shocked because Google’s estimate (apparently based on my IP address and “near by wireless devices”) was about 40 feet off.  I can literally throw my coffee mug and hit the pedestrian that’s standing where this little blue dot is.

The green pin indicates where I actually am.  The blue dot is where Google thinks I am “within 150 meters”

I thought it was a fluke that it was so close based on that broad set of details.  So I gave it a few more tries.  where I live, Google has me located right across the street.  A place I went last night Google had me located just on the corner. Again, a stones throw away.

This certainly has me thinking of how the hell can they be so accurate.  An IP address is a pretty broad piece of information.  At home and most cafés that I go to the IP addresses used are from large cross country providers.  Details for these IPs are usually provided on a city-level. The only real way to get exact locations for these IPs is to get a legal subpoena and ask the ISPs themselves for who and where the IP was used at a certain time.

That leads me to wonder about the other piece of information.  “Near by Wireless Devices.”  Like what? other access points? other.. other what? My laptop has no other nearby devices.  Is it taking into consideration the 10 or so other wireless networks that I could try to connect to?  It must be.

But how does it know where access points such as “Harper Sucks” and “dlink” and “omar2″ are physically located?  This is the part that frightens me.

I think because I know how GPS works. I know how cellphone triangulation works.  I know how wireless triangulation works.  But all those methods require known points.  How do they know the points of these other networks?

Boggled.  Time for more research.