[secretsatan]

I’m guilty of sending results to null island for various reasons and it can be confusing, but to give the user simply an error would be worse, as they have nothing rather than something.

If for some reason we can’t get a geolocation, for various reasons, even a user simply denying access to gps, we can still deliver meaningful results as while the data is improperly located, it still has meaningful coordinates relative to itself and can be transformed later.

[tgflynn]

If you can handle an error and still return meaningful data that's fine, but returning the coordinates 0,0 to the user because GPS isn't working is far worse than giving them an error message. At that point you're essentially lying to them.

[secretsatan]

You need an origin, and tbh, there’s things that could be worse, somethings that looks close to what you expect, but actually subtly wrong, which is something we deal with on pretty much a daily basis. At least most of our customers are very unlikely to be doing anything at null island and the problem is obvious.

To a certain extent, all gps data is lying to you, it’s about figuring out how much it’s lying to you, sticking something at 0,0 is fairly tame and much easier to detect than something being out by 5cm

We do indicate to the user in the ui if no gps signal is available for example, or it’s low quality, but sometimes we get things like the system reporting it’s current location as the estimated location of the last wifi connection.

We also might start something and have no gps, but acquire it later, could be seconds, minutes or never, the accuracy can increase and decrease, we don’t force the user to give up, we record what we can. we still face limitations from software further down the chain that require coordinates as inputs.