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Comment by voltaireodactyl | Hacker News Reader

This assumes such a database is necessary in this first place, which in my mind would require serious justification to prove, given that it creates a situation where the customer’s security is degraded by default.

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I do wonder how much it actually does improve location accuracy on phones. Certainly if you have no GPS signal at all it'll give you something rather than nothing, but if you do have GPS, does it really improve things?

If you are in an urban area (especially at the time it was introduced), it will really improve things, mainly because GPS* signal reflections in urban areas disrupt proper positioning. It won't put you into another continent but it tends to be around two magnitudes worse, especially when you're moving (from ~1 meter to ~100 meters). The fact that multi-band GPS is now common does reduce this problem, but this is still helpful in dense areas with high skyscrapers that can still attenuate both bands.

* I'm using GPS here as shorthand for all GNSS systems (including GLONASS and Galileo).

At my workplace it used to identify my location as various places within a 300 mile radius of my actual location correlating (at best) to places where our ISP had a footprint, but sometimes even places that it didn't. In any case I had never connected to to our WiFi with my phone, so it would have to be correlating the IPs of users who had. I eventually found a place where you could submit location services corrections to Google and now it gets within 100 feet of the building.

We used to joke about making a digital sign above our office door saying "Welcome to ___" which would use the location returned by the Google AGPS service.

Ever since "private relay" became available on my iphone (which I don't disable even when at home), whenever I get on google maps on my PC (so not going through the private relay) google maps always shows me in random cities hundreds of miles away.

Maybe this has been useful when introduced, but I'm not convinced it still is the case.

Without it, your phone's location services would be next to useless in any kind of more urban area (next to useless = you'd have to wait for minutes for the phone to get a fix and burn a lot of battery in the process). It would not function inside a lot of buildings _at all_.

People HATE HATE HATE and complain loudly at their phones if they fall back to pure A-GNSS positioning.

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