My phone keeps going to Mumbai.

My phone keeps going to Mumbai.

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karma mechanic

Original Poster:

729 posts

123 months

Thursday 18th December 2014
quotequote all
Often I pick up my phone in the morning and the current weather shows as sunny and warm. Closer inspection reveals that the BBC Weather app is giving the weather for Mumbai.

Looking at the location history shows that my phone thinks it is in Mumbai quite often, particularly at night when I'm not using it. Like the early hours of today:


It is always the same location in Mumbai, zooming in shows it is next to a major station. The KML file shows repeated instances with coordinates of 72.8884664 19.0695445, as shown by the distance from starting location across the bottom.

Location services is set to use fine location and GPS is enabled. Usually the location tracking is exact. I'm assuming that this is the location of a phone mast in Mumbai, and for some reason when the phone is idle at night it sometimes gets a tower descriptor which matches one in Mumbai rather than Hampshire. Apart from that, any ideas? Phone is a Note 3 on Three.

karma mechanic

Original Poster:

729 posts

123 months

Thursday 18th December 2014
quotequote all
Nothing else odd apart from location glitches - and I'm very fussy about security.

Trawling back through past weeks and months of location history I can see that particular location in Mumbai crops up quite often. However, there are also cases when travelling where the normal sequence of locations is interspersed with somewhere completely different. I can see one from a few weeks ago where I drove from Southampton to Bournemouth and back. All the location points look correct except for a few arbitrary ones that are in the middle of a field near Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire.

It would seem to be an artifact of the location handling, I'm guessing that it occurs when it gets the location from other sources than GPS.

Very odd though.

karma mechanic

Original Poster:

729 posts

123 months

Thursday 18th December 2014
quotequote all
This one fits with that theory. On this day I was in Southampton, on board the Queen Mary 2. I also travelled around the Southampton area so there are a large number of perfectly correct locations.
However, according to my phone I was also at various times in New York (where the QM2 had come from) and Hamburg (where it was going to).


karma mechanic

Original Poster:

729 posts

123 months

Thursday 18th December 2014
quotequote all
ccr32 said:
How do you get all this location history mumbo? Not seen this before, or at least didn't think it was publicly available...
It needs a Google account, so basically an Android phone. On the phone make sure 'Location history' is set on. It is inside the 'Location' settings area.

Then login to your Google account in your browser at maps.google.com/locationhistory and it should all be there as soon as you've got some history.

karma mechanic

Original Poster:

729 posts

123 months

Thursday 18th December 2014
quotequote all
I've managed to find a few more anomalous ones, so the list is:

Manchester
Marlborough
Martin Dales (Lincs)
Mexico City
Mumbai
Norwich

plus the New York and Hamburg ones that are almost certainly associated with hardware moving.

Odd that the others are quite close in the alphabet though - maybe some corruption of a database somewhere.