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Your smartphone does a lot of absurd things, including reporting its location should it ever be lost or stolen. Of course, that's only helpful if the technology really works correctly. A couple in suburban Atlanta can personally evidence to inaccuracy of location services in today'southward smartphones. Christina Lee and Michael Saba become frequent visitors at their home demanding the render of stolen phones. Phone-tracking apps are fingering them as the guilty parties, but no one tin can figure out why, Fusion reports.

Lee and Saba say this has happened more than a dozen times in less than a year. People show up at all times of the day and nighttime, sometimes accompanied by police. They insist their devices are within the house, merely Lee and Saba can but explicate the situation to the best of their power. Police have even shown upwardly looking for missing persons who had been tracked via smartphones.

They don't know why and so many phones report their location inside their home. About people believe them, but isn't this what a real telephone thief would say? The owners of these devices think they accept incontrovertible bear witness of wrongdoing, but this is just the latest example of how sketchy location services tin be. Lee and Saba have been able to avoid any serious altercations, but they wonder what will happen in the event someone more than determined or angry shows upwardly in search of their telephone. Maybe the explanations won't be enough.

A similar story popped upwards a few years dorsum in Las Vegas, where ane man's dwelling house was being repeatedly identified as the location of lost Sprint phones. That turns out to take been a misconfiguration of the prison cell towers around his abode, but Lee and Saba are getting visits from everyone — Android and iPhone owners on Dart, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. They don't know who'south to arraign, then no 1 knows who should set up it.

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When a mobile device reports a location, it uses several signals to speed up the process and account for various conditions. About devices will use a combination of Wi-Fi and cellular signals to get a full general location, usually accurate to within tens of meters. The actual GPS radio takes longer to lock on, but is accurate to within a few feet one time it does. However, phones volition stick with the cell-assisted location if GPS cannot function because it'south disabled or the phone is within a edifice with thick walls.

Lee and Saba have wondered if their router has something to do with the baroque location (MAC addresses are frequently tied to physical locations), but both Apple and Google use separate databases for this. The carriers are also unhelpful in looking into the issue. The couple even filed a complaint with the FCC, merely the agency said this does not fall under its jurisdiction. It's possible that all the owners of the stolen phones are using a cross-platform third-party tracking app that has a bad location database, merely that's just speculation. For the fourth dimension beingness, Lee and Saba might consider the equivalent of a "no soliciting" sign. Mayhap "No, we don't have your phone."