google skeptic

Oops:

Yesterday Google announced that the “My Location” feature familiar to anyone who’s used Google Maps on a mobile device—the little blue button that shows you your position on a map—is now available to people accessing Google Maps from their laptop or desktop computers as well (as long as they’re using the latest versions of the Firefox or Chrome browsers). But there’s a problem: Users are reporting in large numbers today that the My Location feature is erratic, placing them in the wrong city and occasionally on the wrong continent.

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Google’s geolocation technology is similar in principle to Skyhook’s—it also depends largely on information about nearby Wi-Fi access points—but the accuracy of the locations actually produced by the new “My Location” feature seems to vary wildly, as users have been discovering over the last day and half. Judging from posts on Twitter, the Google system is placing some people thousands of miles away from their actual locations.

An unusual number of people, for example, report that the My Location feature shows them as being in downtown Austin, TX, even if they’re half a continent away. “Google Maps’ new ‘Show My Location’ feature puts me in the middle of Austin, TX. I’m actually downtown Manhattan,’ PhoneTag.com co-founder Mark Dillon tweeted today.

read the whole thing at The Browser Geolocation Wars: Skyhook’s CEO on Why Google Maps is Misreading Your Location | Xconomy.