[wasting_time]

They may be thinking of Google's coarse location feature where the handset checks SSIDs in the proximity against Googles database for fast lookup.

[dwa3592]

This is correct but if the phone's internet is off, there is no way for BSSID look up but maps might collect this in the background for telemetry and send it to the server once the internet is turned back on.

[psd1]

On android, that's false. Turning off wifi or internet does not disable bssid scanning. You can do it, but it's buried in the settings.

[jraph]

Oh yeah, makes sense didn't think about this especially since I don't have the google services.

That's not really GPS anymore so when discussing the topic it would be worth being exact on this.