Hi. On 27.03.2014, at 03:20 , B.J. Herbison <[email protected]> wrote: > Three examples of bad results from the location button.
Which version of the stumbler app where you using? Please upgrade to 0.17 if you haven’t yet. This version is the first to include cell data in the “find my location” test mode. > 1: I've run MozScanner many times at my office--I scan driving to the parking > lot and then walking into the building. Recently pressed the find location > button inside my office (where my phone can't reach GPS). The service > couldn't find my location. Shouldn't it have been able to recognize some of > the wifi networks in the building and use the GPS position from outside? WiFi-based search can fail for a number of reasons today. It hasn’t been a focus for us lately, while we look more at FxOS devices shipped into new markets. Would you be willing to share the list of visible WiFi networks at your office with me in private? In that case I could look them up in our database directly and try to diagnose why the search might have failed. > 2: I just pressed the location button at my well-scanned home, and the > location shown was over half a mile away. (If the location is intentionally > vague instead of precise the icon should be changed as the finger point > implies precision.) We haven’t really done much of any work to provide precise results. The accuracy (size of the circle) is currently hardcoded to 500m (~0.3miles). The position estimate can currently be thrown off rather easily. One example might be inaccurate observations from indoor use where GPS tends to have accuracies in the many hundreds of meters range. Another case might be based on the delay it takes for WiFi networks to vanish from being reported by the OS, so WiFi networks can show up in readings up to a couple miles away based on how fast you are traveling. This can happen for any of the WiFi networks in range, as we currently report the averaged position estimate over all networks (weighted equally). So this imprecision is expected, but not intentional in the sense of privacy protections. > 3: After pressing the location button I noticed I was scanning. To test > whether asking for location turns on the scanner (it does) I tried asking for > location again. This time the location was in the next town over. It might > possibly be a location based on my IP address, but since I've scanned my home > with GPS and wifi signals many times why can't if find the correct location? See answer 1. Without more details it’s hard to tell. Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
