Kitz Forum
Chat => Tech Chat => Topic started by: Weaver on May 04, 2021, 10:03:03 PM
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I may have had a moan some while back about this, so apologies. I now get a message from Apple when I am using one of my other iPads warning me about the use of my Apple ID account, simply because I have logged in using a different one of my machines. The message contains an utterly laughable attempt at geolocating the other me, and nowadays I always seem to be in central London! Presumably it’s actually the result of trying to geolocate the place where some of Andrews and Arnold’s servers or routers are parked. Geolocation is always such a horrible joke. Does it ever work for anyone?
I have even - as an experiment - tried adding geolocation info into the dns for my own boxes’ IPv4 addresses to try to give things a little help. Mind you, Apple might be using IPv6 not IPv4 at certain times.
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Basic geolocation is based on where the IP address range is registered to, which is generally your ISP.
The next level up uses WiFi and Bluetooth triangulation but obviously that depends on people not changing their routers since the last time the database for an area was updated. Not sure where Bluetooth comes in there, possibly only public places that deliberately place Bluetooth beacons such as shopping malls for indoor GPS.
For example, Google collect nearby WiFi networks and GPS location when they come round doing streetview updates. So you can get a rough idea of the area based on which networks can be seen and how strong their signal is compared to what the Streetview car saw.
In theory they could just have all users collecting the information and feeding it back to the cloud, but as it needs GPS to collate it all that would kill the battery life so they probably don't.
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I had forgotten about this ‘advanced’, as opposed to ‘basic’, geolocation. That really works well; I’ve noticed Apple using it. When my wife drives past a house, her reported position in the Apple geolocation system suddenly updates.