For about a week now, Google Maps has been rather confused about where I am. It fixes me at a specific spot in Bukit Batok, when in reality I’m like 10km away, in an area also wrongly labeled as Pulau Bukom in the zoomed out map view. There’s nothing wrong with the GPS. It’s the way location is determined from cell tower information. For a while, though, I sent myself on a wild goose chase wondering if my dabbling with the latest CyanogenMod ROMs (alpha versions then), and particularly since I build them myself, might have messed up something on the phone.
However, it was not my ROM. I’ve verified that another Android phone on the same telco in the same place also ends up having its location fixed at that same spot in Bukit Batok. So either my telco has been messing around with its cell tower identifiers, or Google has mucked up their cell tower database.
I searched around online and found a handful of complaints about the reliability of the cell-tower location fixing method. Someone even quipped that if he ever had to run away from the law, he would turn on Latitude.
Where in Google can I send my complaint to? I don’t want to have to turn GPS on. Location has been working pretty well until last week.
Chances are it’s isn’t the cell tower. If you don’t use GPS the next thing it will try is a GeoIP lookup which maps MAC addresses that your WiFi comes across to a database of locations. The problem with this system is if someone moves a device with the MAC address that you are receiving, it’s no longer in the spot the database thinks. Then you have to wait for them to rescan and update their database. I’m not sure what GeoIP database Google uses, but I’ve had issues each time I’ve moved where my phone thought I was still at the old location for up to a month or so.
Nope, it isn’t wifi. I didn’t turn mine on at all. The “problem” was repeatable with another friend’s phone, who isn’t on wifi either.
Does the cell tower broadcast it’s location? If so, then perhaps a technician put the wrong location setting on a cell tower, and thus the triangulation fails? If so, Google can’t fix it, the provider would have to. And it would affect other platforms that use cell tower location, so it should be “easy” to test…