iPhone reporting my location in a different state

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iPhone reporting my location in a different state

For the past week, my iPhone has been pinging my location in Virginia. I do not live anywhere near Virginia nor have I ever been. It will do it randomly throughout the day. It shows up on my tracked locations on iPhone, on my snapchat map, and Life 360 logs this as well.

There is no rhyme or reason as to when this happens, but it is constantly happening.

I have reset my location services so, therefore, no app is causing this. Find my iPhone has the correct location. I have shut my phone off and turned it back on. I have also reset my Apple ID and logged all devices out.

I greatly appreciate any help! This is extremely frustrating.

iPhone XR, iOS 14

Posted on May 27, 2021 8:17 PM

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Answer 1

May 27, 2021 8:25 PM in response to Meeko2222

Are you referring to your physical location (i.e. what is showing in the Find My app or Maps app), or are you referring to the login location (i.e. what shows up in the multi-factor authentication alert on your devices)?

If the former, this should be based on your GPS and the Wi-Fi network database which Apple uses. Sometimes the Wi-Fi network database can report an incorrect location, but this usually gets corrected fairly quickly with the aid of GPS location data.

The latter, however, is based on geo-location of your IP address. This is fully controlled by your ISP or carrier. I use the website https://ipinfo.io to validate this, however there are multiple databases which report varying information depending on their data sources (I'm not sure which combination of databases Apple uses though).

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Answer 2

Meeko2222 Author

Level 1

9 points

May 28, 2021 8:28 AM in response to Jeffrey A.

When I pull up maps, it has my location correct. On find my phone, it has exactly where I’m at.

On my significant locations on the iPhone it shows Virginia. On life 360, it shows I’m taking multiple trips to Virginia. On Snapchat map, it has pulled up that I’m in Virginia.

Hopefully that helps with what the problem could be.

The photo attached are just the most recent two “trips to Virginia I’ve taken.” It keeps doing this, and it keeps going to the same location in Virginia. This has been happening since May 18.

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iPhone reporting my location in a different state

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