Administrator of thelemmy.club

Nerd, truck driver, and kinda creeped that you’re reading this.

  • 9 Posts
  • 764 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Nah, GPS isn’t a two-way thing. There’s no way for the GPS system to track devices.

    Your phone figures out where itself is using the satellites as markers, the phone doesn’t emit any signals for this. It’s offline.

    Basically the way it works is GPS satellites broadcast a very accurate time signal, (and occasionally data about the satellites exact orbit). Your phone sees this and uses signals from at least four satellites to find it’s location. It does this by measuring the delay in the signal between them. (Due to the speed of light, each signal will be delayed slightly). Knowing the delay in the signal you will know how far away you are from the satellite, and knowing the exact time along with it’s orbit info will tell you where exactly the satellite is. But knowing that you’re 13,000mi away from a satellite doesn’t help much. But then if you look at the other signals you can see you’re 16,000mi from another satellite, and so on which when you use 4 satellites will leave you with one possible spot you can be.




  • Fog Of World really isn’t so bad. For some reason it makes you back up to Dropbox or Onedrive but I suppose you could just not hook them up and keep it all offline. It’s better than handing your data to some random company, I doubt Dropbox/Microsoft are going to analyze some random app’s data like this to track you.