Ipad location services and VPN

NoHeat

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So I'm traveling in Prague Czech, and I am using a VPN.

How is the MLB AtBat app detecting I am in Europe?

I verified that my IP looks like I'm in Iowa. I have turned off location services always, using my iPad settings for this app.

Nevertheless, the AtBat app does not allow me to watch a baseball game, and it shows me a map of central Europe, suggesting it generally knows where I am, and it also shows a note that it is unable to determine my location as is required for access.
 
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It often does not use only one source of information for spying purposes.
Surrounding WiFi signals, cell towers and even BT phones in the vicinity will rat you out quickly. :)
 
NSA database.

All joking aside, iPads seem to have a "map" of various wifi connections and can determine location from those. Each wifi sends some sort of unique identifier, even if you are not connected. When i was in Taiwan, my wifi only iPad did a surprisingly good job of showing my location on a map, even though I had no internet connection. Before i went off-line, I made a view of the area around my hotel with the iPad map application. If I went off the map or if I tried to resize it, I lost the map (couldn't refresh the view) but as long as I just looked at the map, the iPad showed what I was located very well as we drove down the street. I find it a bit spooky that Apple (or the NSA) has mapped that so well.
 
I suspect it uses GPS when available, towers when not, and known WiFi locations for more precision.

Rich
 
Apple is evil.

You think the other mobile OSs aren't doing this? Good luck with that. Hell, don't even need the OS to do it, any cellular network can do the job close enough to know you're "In Europe". Hell, way closer than that.
 
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