I was playing with my iPod Touch today, skimming throught Google maps, when I accidentaly hit the Show current location button. I knew that my iPod doesn’t have a GPS so I never really expected it to work. I was really stunned when after 3 seconds it showed me a map of Uppsala, with a circle around a place that actually was my location.

My first reaction was: what?! And I immediately went to check if my iPod really does not have a GPS. It didn’t. So I started googling and after a few links I finally knew what was going on: iPod uses WiFi to provide geolocation.

Still, this was not an answer for me. WiFi access points usually don’t report their own GPS coordinates. That would make them too expensive with very little benefit to the user. Something different had to be behind this.

A few more minutes after that I found the answer: there is a company that runs cars with a GPS and WiFi on board, that scan MAC addresses of WiFi access points and stores them together with their positions. When a device like my iPod Touch needs to find out it’s location, it sends a list of all access points around it to a web service of this company. If you are lucky, the MAC addresses are already in their database and using triangulation, they can find your location with precision of ~100 meters.

That’s pretty impressive for a device with no real geolocation hardware.