Hi I was wondering how does my Windows Phone (Lumia) can detect my location in apps like “Here” to within about 30 metres even when I’m indoors?
I found this link:
I wonder which ones would be relevant.
Also can the person you’re calling such as emergency services easily find your location using its location feature?
Also do all smart phones do geotagging by default? (store the location of where you are when taking JPEGs) I haven’t seen websites that take advantage of this… (e.g. facebook, etc)
My new android Samsung Galaxy S5 has geotagging of photos off by default. When I turned it on, it warned me of the privacy concerns. One data point for you.
Along with gps and cell tower methods, most will use wifi as well. WiFi networks are fairly unique, not just the name of the network, but each has it’s own ID number, as well as frequency. As smart devices log into these networks a table is constructed stating where these WiFi networks are. So if you connect or are in range of a unique WiFi network that had been previously mapped you will get your location very fast.
Probably through GPS. I am also using a windows phone and I am able to detect my location using the default “Maps” application even if I am not connected to the internet. I have a pre-downloaded map of my country by the way.
Probably. There is a “Find my phone” option in the settings. I have tried this once and I was able to ring and locate my phone through a web browser. I am not sure if the phone needs to be connected to the internet to do this though. (My phone was connected to the internet when I did this).
I think it is set by default. You have the option to turn it off in the camera settings. Also, most apps will ask you first if you will allow it to access your location. You can turn on/off your phone’s ability to detect its location in the settings. You can read some infos there too.
To get within 30meters or so GPS has to be used. Triangulation will only get you to an approximate area like 1/4mile if you’re lucky.
On a slightly different but related subject-- in dealing with the problem of using these phones while driving. I have heard that GPS capable phones can be made inoperative while in motion by slight modification of the software in the internal program. Is this true? If so it solves the problem with only a small inconvenience for a few people.
Sure. That’s trivial for the manufacturer to do. I could have done it in about half a day, back when I was in the business. And most of that time would be reading existing code, because I didn’t typically play at that high a level in the stack.
One problem is you need to make sure it’s the person DRIVING…the passenger doesn’t want their phone disabled. And you don’t want someone walking down the street to suffer, so just looking for motion isn’t enough.
It also means you’re disabling using the device for mapping services.
And you’d want to make sure emergency calls are still possible.
Oh…and sometimes you lose GPS signal if you’re going through a tunnel or in bad enough weather. So you have to decide how to handle that.
Being selective is possible, but trickier.
The biggest issues, though, is going to be the market. Unless all phones are mandated to have this feature, I suspect consumers will pick phones that do what they want them to do…that is, work as phones.
I understand your objections and at least one could be easily met by setting them for say >10mph. Of course because of market forces anything like this would have to be mandated.
In a few years as the car population turns over most cars will have built in Nav systems that are better than from a phone.
The main disadvantage would be passenger use. Whatever did we do in a car before we had these things?
As with everything, do we decide that the fun and or convenience of many people outweigh the death and destruction visited on a comparative few? Just have to wait until better stats are in on cellphones and driving.