location tracking

[ergo owl]

"Location services turned off - No applications can obtain local information"

Thats what it says on my phone under privacy settings yet, here I sit looking at the pre-installed Maps application showing my position on the map with a 100 meter accuracy.

Whats up with that?

[barray]

Maybe if you are connect to WiFi this provides enough information?

[ergo owl]

Then what is the purpose of the setting?

[bcnaz]

I THINK,,

  The maps app does run from the phone,  However it does pull the 'maps' from the internet.
     The actual maps are not stored on your phone,   just the 'App'

     And I believe the onboard GPS locates you on the map via the satellite coordinates.

       So,  No evil Google is tracking you.

  You can turn-off your cellular service (in settings ) and still see your location.

[wibble]

It's a fair question - I don't know how that setting is supposed to work. I don't think the underlying Geoclue or ModemManager APIs have any checks for app-level permissions. Your location is probably arriving from Geoclue doing a lookup on WiFi AP location and/or Cell ID location.

[wi_badger]

In my experience, Maps starts up from Wi-Fi if available, and seems to use Whois information for the IP address - sometimes it shows my location over 100 miles away from my home, at what I assume to be some facility of my ISP.     This location varies from time to time, I should start logging this information, correlate it to my dynamically assigned IP, and try to figure out what is really going on.
When Maps has been open for a while, if I am somewhere that sees enough sky for the GPS to lock in, my position changes to the actual location +/- 100 meters or less.

Websites such as Amazon or Home Depot that try to use location services info from the phone do not seem to get any, so I think that the setting works as it should ... Amazon mostly seems to think I am in Seattle for some reason; Madison or Eau Claire are fairly common false locations that they see ... again probably IP address based.


- Yes, it's IP based. When I do a lookup of my IP it matches the incorrect location Maps shows. When I turn off WiFi and go outside the GPS gets my true location. Maps has no memory of this; when I turn WiFi back on, boom, there I am back in the North Woods. Throughout this procedure I had a 3 to 4 bar 4G cell signal, tower location does not seem to be involved at all.

[devrtz]

Relevant wiki article

[wi_badger]

Relevant wiki article

Interesting, thanks !

[bcnaz]

Relevant wiki article

Thanks devrtz  !   Very informative.

  I love my Pine phone(s), but if the GPS is not the exclusive source of my location, ie: 
  cell towers and wifi triangulation is included in finding my location,
     I am very very  disappointed in this device.

I do also own a $50. handheld Garmin GPS that gives my exact location with absolutely no connection
to any outside "services".

My handheld GPS is a receive only device, it uses only the satellite signals for location. 

I thought the phone only needed the internet to display the maps.

This could open a whole new subject on privacy,

**  Should I remove the maps app ?

  Would that help prevent wifi triangulation ?

[wi_badger]

We are using the word "location" in this discussion to mean a couple of different things; location as reported to the user in the Maps app, for instance, versus location as reported to other entities on the internet, "mostly" for commercial purposes.

As I understand the wiki article linked above, cell and wifi location is used to furnish location data to the user, as in the Maps app; whether that information is passed to others is controlled by the privacy settings.  As far as I have been able to determine so far, the privacy settings appear to work, that is to say no location information is being passed along to others.   I am just beginning to look into this, but a few days ago I turned on location services to see what happened, and so far no app has requested this information.  
FWIW, I don't think any of the most intrusive apps are even available for Linux, for which I am grateful.

A point I am unclear about is my own phone's relation to Mozilla Location ... for some reason I have never seen the Mobian first time setup wizard mentioned in the wiki article; I am still using a very early image (Debian+Phosh, pre-Mobian) that has been upgraded many times ... so I never answered "yes" to sending Mozilla my location.  This may be why I have trouble with Maps when on mobile data rather than WiFi ? Also why I seem to only get location from IP and GPS and not from cell ?  Maybe I should get an up-to-date image on SD and try how that works.

Worth noting in passing that one obvious leak of location data is to Mozilla Location Services; how much personal identifying information is carried by this channel is something I do not know.

More on this topic, maybe, as I learn more.