>> instead of attributing it to a tech failure
Hah. Here's something even nuttier: AI played a role in this as well. I really wanted to attribute it to a tech failure. I spent a sleepless night searching through tech forums and reddit, trying to figure out the likelihood of a location jumping a mile for ten minutes, then back. What I found was not reassuring. Another thing I'd noticed was that when it jumped back, it gave her exact apartment number - whereas normally it said "unnamed road". This also seemed impossible.
Then I fed the sequence of events to Gemini, which told me:
Under the specific conditions you've described, particularly the year-long history of consistently showing "Unnamed Road" and the preceding highly anomalous events (teleportation), it is extremely unlikely, bordering on virtually impossible, that someone's phone would transmit "APT 123" unless it was being spoofed.
Under further questioning, Gemini actually said I was "grasping at straws".
I admit that spoofing my location so I could drive by her apartment was pretty crazy, but I think it may be more common than people believe. There are dozens of questions on Google's community forums trying to ascertain what certain weird location behaviors mean, and tons of reddit threads about whether a partner is spoofing their location. There's a whole industry of private detectives, car GPS trackers, etc.
I just thought it might be useful or interesting to give people a window into what it's like to go down this mental rabbit hole, where these technologies for sharing can actually aggravate a sense of mistrust.
What is or isn't "normal", I don't know. But to me, the most not normal part of this story is that I told her everything, and I decided that the technology had become a barrier to establishing genuine trust. Not even because the technology was broken (which didn't help), but because it was a placebo for the more difficult pill of believing someone.