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In Android, you actually can't trust when the OS says the WiFi is "off." Yes, the network is not connected, but google is still tracking SSIDs.
by everdrive 8y ago
In Android, you actually can't trust when the OS says the WiFi is "off."
Yes, the network is not connected, but google is still tracking SSIDs.
- lucb1e 8y agoYou can turn that off, though. Not that I trust it to work, but at least legally you can deny that. Do you happen to know about GPS? Because my phone sometimes picks up GPS faster than should be physically possible (knowing a thing or two about how GPS works), and sometimes it takes a normal amount of time. I have GPS turned off almost all the time, don't have a Google account logged in, everything I can deny to Google apps I have denied, nothing weird seems to be running in process lists... any idea where to even start looking?
- kiallmacinnes 8y agoMost phones use Assisted GPS. It's a combination of cell tower triangulation and GPS. You'll get a potentially inaccurate "GPS" location based on the cell towers and signals you can see, and this will eventually turn into a real GPS lock. As I understand it, this cell tower location actually helps achieve a real GPS location faster that would be normal - but I'm unsure how that would work .. I'd be guessing at best ;)
- int_19h 8y agoAs I understand it, roughly knowing your position lets it get a lock on enough satellites faster, because, given position and time, it knows where they're supposed to be. http://gpsinformation.net/main/gpslock.htm http://gpsinformation.net/main/gpslock.htm Also, I believe that part of the reason why Google wants that SSID info is because they can later use it for location purposes as well, making that initial position determination more accurate than with just the cell towers alone. In general, the more environmental data they can correlate with accurate GPS coordinates, the better they can predict location when GPS is unavailable.
- drivebycomment 8y agoFor non-assisted GPS, the GPS device needs to download orbital information from the satellite directly when first powered on - with only ~50 bits/s of bandwidth, it can take a while - minutes to tens of minutes. With Assisted GPS, the GPS device can download the satellite orbital information and almanac directly from AGPS server (e.g. cell phone tower), usually at much higher bandwidth - as those local, always-running servers can constantly download and cache all satellite information.
- lucb1e 8y agoThe sats don't change orbit every few hours though, also without AGPS you usually can use the ephemerides from last time you used it. This is fun to observe when you buy a new phone and don't connect network yet, it takes a good while to find any satellites and finally find a fix. Then after cycling GPS, it finds it almost instantly.
- j1elo 8y agoThen how do the classic driving GPS devices work? I'm thinking here good old TomTom models, mine must have like what, 10 years? It typically claimed (not using it much lately) to have GPS reception after maybe 20 or 30 seconds since power up. I believe it cached the position of the GPS satellites, or something similar... could that be it?
- lucb1e 8y agoNo, that involve sending data to Google (one of the reasons I mentioned turning all that crap off), or a relatively complex config to swap out the location provider for Mozilla's which I haven't done yet on this phone.
- kiallmacinnes 8y agoTo be fair, the WiFi connection is off, it's just the radio is not... It's not so much a lie, rather it's an implementation that covers the average persons expectations 100%, but keeps something they might not want, but weren't thinking about when they pressed that button. To be clear, I don't like the behaviour.. but it's not misleading, it just doesn't cater to everyones desires.