Just type this into the googles: How accurate is cell phone location data.
"By using cell tower triangulation (3 towers), it is possible to determine a phone location to within an area of about ¾ square mile."
Whatever you do people, stop using your phone to navigate through the city!
I work for a telecom.
The tracking used for the fleet cars used cell tower triangulation and way way more accurate then that.
Accurate to the point of 5G becoming real time. Where simply moving from one grid to the next has triangulated you, your device has been identified in it. Who has that data becomes the question, what does it take to acquire it. Harder where there isn't coverage, the lag, until they're fitting it everywhere, or trying too. Wait for the EVs. But the grid can pinpoint your location, moving from one to the next. You're a beacon through most devices, and depending on what they're using, has full building layouts, upto the point of optics.
That is partially true. It is some kind of average among all cases where there is 3 base stations "see" one phone. But it is heavily depends on the used cellular network generation, distance to base stations, landscape, buildings around and the hell ton of other stiuff. In towns where base stations are on every block corner precision is much higher, up to hundreds of square meters, if the network is less dense, reflections from buildings and interference lower the precision. In the rural area when there is only one base station see mobile device it is a 90-120 degrees arc with the width of few hundred meters and length depending on the distance from base station, i.e. from that ¾ square mile close to the tower to dozens of square miles far away from it.
Really, triangulation is not the main source of phone position. GPS receiver in phone often permanently on and it's data constantly shared with multiple parties, from all that shitty social networks to the "innocent" app of some cafes of gas stations installed because of that annoying "do you have our app to get discount and collect bonuses?" each fucking time you visit that place. And of course most people just have navigation app turned on permanently.
That shit share your position with precision of few meters.
Worse, that quote is from the FCC. Google's just serving that up as the result of the search query.
Source: did what you said to do. Other responses include "30 meters" and "3 meters" or even "up to several miles" from different sources in the results.
Edit: I guess you're "technically" right (the best kind!) because Google is the one spreading around all those wildly different numbers in the first place.
Dude, there’s a GPS chip in your phone that can put you down <3 feet... (dammit that looks like a heart...stupid accidental emoticons... making me look like a footworshiping fetishist!) ...that is, less than 3 feet. Fuck, i ruined my point.
Ha! lol
Smart phones: Wi-Fi geolocation (indoors 30m~). Google has an API to use this for business and IoT. GPS (outdoors 1m - 30m depending on module) Bluetooth and BLE 5.0 (<1m and directional)