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0 pointshocuspocus2y ago0 comments

Not really, best in class network probes will regularly give you positions that are wrong by a few km, you need quite a bit of cleaning to reconstruct accurate paths.

That's why something like MDT was added to 3GPP standards and emergency calls trigger a hard GPS fix.

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hackmiester2y ago

Sure, that seems like something that could happen. However, meanwhile, in practice, my friend was having a mental break and the cops narrowed my friend's location down to 3 possible houses in a neighborhood.

hocuspocusOP2y ago

See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36617330

Abusing emergency location services is a much better explanation here. They can ping the device for a short time and it'll do its best (using A-GPS and WiFi) to provide an accurate position, without involving anyone since it's fully automated. Collecting positions from a carrier's network infrastructure is a more complex and slow task in comparison.

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