"Get a list of visible SSIDs" is exactly how phones derive your location. There's little distinction between seeing SSIDs and seeing GPS coordinates for 99.9% of the population.
Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? (like "Back in the real world", "you are exaggerating", "no you're fantasizing" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38710396, and so on). This kind of thing is against HN's rules and also spoils the substantive points you're trying to make. If you'd make your substantive points thoughtfully instead, we'd appreciate it.
If you really want ‘intellectual curiosity’ and ‘discussion’ you will have to change your and your colleagues stance on using the voting system as disagree buttons and enforce it, and stop the part where people are blocked if they disagree with the mob, because everyone is pressing the disagree button (and some people the ‘super disagree’ flag button).
Of course the way you run the site is up to you but if you do not change it you will get to enjoy a boring agreefest with only hivemind opinions, endless fistbumping around rehashed ideas.
And fine if you have opinions on how I word my thoughts, but there’s also the other side of others calling disagreeing trolling and implying that you think something doesn’t work as well as they think it does means you’re too stupid to understand it. Action leads to reaction and fairness demands that calling me out means you also have to call out the other side. The other side that downdisagreed my original post, which you can’t argue is inflammatory, so far that it gets hidden and I get blocked from responding. While it is a valid point, and it ultimately gets agreed to 1 again. I don’t care about the points but you can’t have a discussion if you can’t respond to people.
Not an exaggeration—Apple’s primary “location services” API, used on iOS/macOS, is just a lookup table for wireless APs’ MAC addresses. [1]
WiFi scanning is much less power intensive than GPS, much more reliable indoors, and often (in dense areas) more accurate even outdoors. iirc the iPhone only connects to “real” GPS in specific situations, such as when visible wifi signals are insufficient (e.g. highway driving).
In 2012 or so I was able to do turn by turn navigation pretty reliably on an ipod touch that did not have any gps capabilities. I think you'll find coarse location is a little more specific than you give it credit for.
Visibility of multiple networks can be used to refine the position.
GPS takes time to acquire and isn't always available indoors. SSID method is quicker, and it's most likely the method your phone uses to get the position first.
As you say, it’s a method to get a coarse location and then refined using GPS which by the way does not really take time to acquire once you have downloaded the almanac and have the coarse location.
So this ‘allows applications to track location’ actually allows applications to track coarse location which then does not allow them to refine using GPS.
I built a small ap on an ESP (where SSID scanning is bread and butter). It would track my location to within a few yards. The down side is it needs multiple SSIDs to do that, so not so useful outside an urban environment.
It’s the same thing. Listing visible SSIDs and comparing them to very comprehensive databases is the whole way precise geolocation works in many devices, like MacBooks. I think even phone navigation has GPS much less precise than you see on screen, and the extra precision is gained with this technique. Making this technique really work is a large part of the reason Google drove or walked every street in the world with their recording gig.
That doesn’t mean seeing an SSID means you are at exactly that location.
If you are in a city you see 50 SSIDs at any given moment. Are you at those 50 locations at the same time? No. Is there a way to triangulate where you are exactly? No, its unreliable and not an exact science.