Is find my accurate

Avieyra2019 wrote:

So my husbands location on find my said he was a mile away from work. He was supposed to be at work. This location was behind an apartment complex. Like a parking place. He denies ever being there. Could he be telling the truth?

You will likely want to discuss this with your own legal representation and not some internet rando like me, as there’s seemingly rather more happening here than has been posted.

It is possible that a location based on cellular data geolocation can be off by as much as a half-kilometer and possibly more, whether due to signal interference or spotty to nonexistent GPS coverage, or due to issues with augmented locations.

Accuracy when robust GPS signals or Wi-Fi positioning is available is usually on the order of a meter or three, and normally within ten or so meters, given a clear and wide view of the sky from the receiver positioning.

That written, I’ve personally seen iPhone positioning errors past a kilometer with some iPhone models in some conditions. This when GPS coverage and augmented positioning is unavailable, and when cellular coverage is spotty.

Here’s an older article on this topic:

https://www.globe.gov/documents/2631933/6965868/42534991.pdf

And positioning caveats here:

https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/

But again, this seemingly isn’t about positioning and positioning errors; this situation well appears far past that.

Is it accurate? Well, let's see. The iPhone relies on three sources for identifying its location: GPS, cellular, & Wi-Fi.

For GPS, roughly every 30 seconds, a GPS satellite broadcasts a time stamp, its current location and some less precise location information for other GPS satellites. It takes 25 of these broadcasts (~12.5 minutes) to obtain the full list of satellite locations. Your iPhone's GPS will need to know, at least, 3 satellite locations ... 4 for elevation.

Once it does, your iPhone's GPS receiver—can calculate to within 10 meters the latitude, longitude, and elevation of your current location along with the exact current time. However, that range will increase if there are any objects blocking the satellite's signal.

Since 12+ mins would be an "eternity" for location updates, most smart phone manufacturers augment satellite data with position info from cellular towers and/or Wi-Fi transmitters. This is known as Assisted GPS. This reduces the location update time to mere seconds ... but become increasing reliant on estimates of the location ... and this is what the iPhone uses.

Not sure I answered your question on accuracy, One thing to keep in mind, is if the iPhone's date & time settings are not correct, this can directly affect location accuracy. Also, if either or both "Location Services" & "Wi-Fi" are disabled, these two will affect the accuracy.

You asked us if your husband was telling the truth. That is not a technical support question. We don't know the answer.

iPhones are sometimes not accurate with their locations at given times. We cannot say whether this may or may not be the case for you.

Right now, my wife's iPhone is indicating that she is at the grocery store. She (and the iPhone) have been home for at least 10 minutes.

Edit to post above. It looks like the location of my wife's iPhone updated correctly about 5 minutes ago. So, it was about 15-20 minutes after she arrived home that the iPhone indicated it was at home as well.

Yes he could be telling the truth, but this is not a family courtroom to settle a marital dispute..