It’s good to know. I suppose the unintuitive part is that “location” means “Wi-Fi scan”. Makes sense for a laptop when you think about it but I wouldn’t have thought of this as the first thing to check.
It's kind of a weird situation we're in with this. Facebook and Google track your location by default and you can go back and look where you've been on a map. I used it to figure out the details of an automated traffic ticket I got on a trip to Europe a couple of years back, so it's not totally useless from a consumer perspective, but it's still creepy. So you opt out, but "location services" keeps tracking you and sending your location data (as represented by the SSIDs and signal strength around you) but not telling you you're being tracked. So you opt out of that, and all the sudden you're subject to a bunch of dark patterns insisting you need to enable it again, even though it's perfectly capable of just using the GPS and keeping everything on the client. I'm glad my life isn't interesting enough for it to matter, I guess.
> the unintuitive part is that “location” means “Wi-Fi scan”
I was under the impression that this has been SOP for mobile device location forever: get rough location via WiFi and/or tower multilateration while GPS is...I don't know the proper terminology here, bootstrapping? That's why your dot tends to start somewhere nearby-ish and then quicky jump to your exact location.
It's possible that I'm way off base or my understanding is outdated, though.
I'm thinking that my devices could have an offline list of known WiFi mac-addresses from when it's checked GPS before and return those for very accurate results without scanning anything.
