Location services wrong on PCs

Glaceon

Over the last week or two, my laptops (personal and work) now think I'm on Orwell Road in Rathgar. In reality I'm in Drogheda. Google Maps and the Windows 10 Maps app are both affected. The Windows 10 Weather app also shows me weather for Dublin instead of Drogheda as it did before. Browser doesn't seem to matter, have tried Firefox and Edge. When I open Google Maps it centres on Drogheda initially but if I allow it to read my location it will change to Rathgar.

My phone is fine, probably because it's reading the actual GPS and not a database somewhere. Any ideas?

Spear

That's down to your public IP being wrongly or outdatedly listed in whatever geo database it's in. You can't correct this on your end.

Glaceon

Just to update this, my IP hasn't changed at all since I got Virgin Media a couple of months ago (I'm bridged and on IPv4). But now my location is showing as a computer shop on Capel Street. It's very strange.

Spear

There's various vendors who supply geo databases of IP as a commercial service, e.q. Quova or Digital Envoy. I'd hazard a guess that in the case of Google, they're trying to match other analytics, such as as searches, in an attempt to pin things down, which in turn would allow them to geotarget ads more precisely.

FanadMan

I'm on Three for broadband. Each time I restart the router it gives me a new location.

Glaceon

I thought I'd post an update on this one. Location services are still wrong in Windows, usually saying either I'm in Rathgar, the Dublin Road in Drogheda (which is wrong but not too wrong) or very occasionally Naan, Thailand (with a time zone change to boot!).

I only use Firefox or Edge so I tried running Chrome out of curiosity. Turns out Chrome was bang on. So that made me suspect that Microsoft's data is wrong. I found an about:config setting for Firefox called geo.provider.ms-windows-location which sounds to me like it uses Windows location services. Setting that to false reports the correct location in Firefox.

Glaceon

Last update, this is now resolved.

I had some spare time so did some research into how the Windows location API works. I found an application at https://bitbucket.org/petrsimon/geolocationtcp-archive/downloads/. It's designed to output GPS NMEA data from the Windows API via a TCP port but it gave me enough information to determine what was going on because it shows where it's getting its data from. When it's getting data from Wi-Fi it was showing as Rathgar. When showing the Dublin Road in Drogheda it was using the cellular triangulation from the GoMo SIM in the LTE card in my laptop. I then found that if I leave my laptop beside a window, it eventually gets a GPS lock and shows the correct location.

That made me remember something from years ago. Google once recommended that if your location is wrong via Wi-Fi then you should leave a GPS-capable phone with Google Maps running for a few hours to force an update. I didn't know if this would work with Microsoft but I tried it anyway; I left Maps open with the GPS data for a few days on and off. Now my location is correct on all devices.

Spear

That's actually kind of disturbing. I never realised that modern location services made such creepy insistent attempts to find out where you were. I was still of the mindset that monolithic databases were used.