Need to understand Location Service...

Question

Need to understand Location Service...

Hello - I'm hoping someone can clarify for me the following situations.

First of all, lets establish hardware. Basically iPad version 2s on IOS 7 (and one Ipad Mini also on IOS 7). We are a secondary school here in UK. Now we have our iPads under the control of Meraki MDM where it has some kind of Location based tracking. Our issue is this - once the offset is put in place for our particular broadband supplier, I have all of them allocated around our school - fair enough. Now when they go home and connect to their respective broadband suppliers, the Meraki dashboard shows them to be located nowhere near where they are actually. Take, for example. a teacher who lives 5 miles from the school, which is central Southern England along the coast between Portsmouth and Brighton. Now the iPad is showing as just outside Worcester, which is around 150 miles away...all i can think of is that it has something to do with where the home broadband is based. Is this true?

Secondly, I have been trying to establish a more accurate location based system in order to track the movements of our iPads and have tried using 'Find My iPhone' along with the iCloud service within Location Services. It is said that it works for iPads as well - but, it is only useful if the device is 'cellular' enabled. My understanding is that, while our iPads are not cellular and are locked (as stated in a policy from Meraki) - no entry can be gained by a thief, therefore no connectivity to broadband, so no connectivity to iCloud for the purpose of location data. Whereas, if they are 'cellular', then they are activily seeking out cells for connection even while locked and so get triangulated for lcoation purposes to iCloud - am I right in my thinking so far....?

My test iPad 2 with IOS 7 had an Apple ID and also Location services enabled with iCloud. Now I wiped the device using the dual key approach and it indeed wiped down to a refreshed state. It then went throught the start up process which entails connecting to a wifi system. At this point it is now connected to the internet, but the iCloud and/or 'Find my iPad' service does not appear to work. I can only assume that it an account-only connection and there is no tie up with either a serial number or a MAC address of the device - I guess this is for privacy concerns, but it would have been handy, so the location service could have kicked in and reported where my iPad had got to...instead iCloud reports offline and the iPad is useless to the thief...so a no-win situation for anyone, including the owner...is this how everyone sees it?

The only way round this, I guess, is an iPad App that seeks out open wifi hotspots while locked and reports back to iCloud, but I guess that ain't gonna happen.... :-(

Thanks for any thoughts thrown at this....

iPad 2, iOS 7.0.4, Managed

Posted on Feb 7, 2014 6:45 AM

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Answer 1

JimHdk

Level 7

28,958 points

Feb 7, 2014 7:14 AM in response to southcoastmike

If you have the WiFi-only iPad your location is determined by the mapped location of nearby WiFi routers.

The WiFi-only iPad does not have GPS. Without GPS location-finding is done by using a Apple location database which contains the MAC addresses of routers and their physical location. A MAC address is a unique number which is built-in to all network devices when manufactured. Each router has a unique MAC address.

The Apple database is built and updated by Apple GPS-enabled devices (primarily iPhones) actually seeing routers and then adding/updating the router's locations into the Apple database.

Note that to be location-mapped or to be used for location determination a WiFi router does not to be connected to just seen. More precise location determination can be done if several nearby routers can be seen. When a router is moved from one location to another erroneous locations can sometimes be reported until the router's location is corrected in Apple's database.

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Answer 2

Feb 7, 2014 7:27 AM in response to southcoastmike

Find my iPhone or Find my iPad does NOT depend on a cellular data connection or a cellular capable device at all.

It depends solely on two things.

1. The device must have an iCloud account installed on it, with the "Find my Iphone/iPad" setting enabled under that account's settings.

2. The device must have an internet connection. It can be a cellular network internet connection, or it can be a wifi internet connection - but it must have an internet connection for communication with the iCloud servers that facilitate the find my device feature.

Find my iPhone/iPad is strictly an internet network feature of Apple's iCloud service - it is tied to the iCloud account and not the device's hardware ID.

Find my iPhone/iPad uses whatever is available for location determination - GPS if the device is GPS enabled (iPhone or wifi+cellular iPad), or wifi location if only wifi is available. However, even if it is able to determine a location, it has to have a live, functional internet connection in order to transmit that information to the iCloud servers so it will show up on the tracking map in your account. So a wifi only iPad may "know" where it is based on nearby wifi nodes, but if it cannot connect to one of those nodes, it cannot transmit that information and thus is effectively untrackable.

Note that an wifi only iPad, if not plugged in, and in sleep mode, will have its wifi radio powered off to conserve battery power. So a wifi only iPad running on battery needs to be awake to be tracked via iCloud.

Do not confuse find my iPhone/iPad with a security feature - it is a convenience feature, useful sometimes for finding a lost device, but it is not meant to be seen as a reliable security feature (there are too many ways it can fail or easily be defeated).

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Answer 3

Courcoul

Level 6

18,838 points

Feb 7, 2014 7:23 AM in response to JimHdk

As side commentary, this is the main reason to invest in a full-fledged GSM iPad, which can happily be used without the SIM chip and having to pay carrier charges. The Location circuitry on GSM iPads include satellite positioning (US-based GPS and Russian GLONASS, useful when in a place where Uncle Sam doesn't want you to know where you are) and magnetic compass (that also affords other side tricks such as being a metal detector). And there's also the support circuitry that allows way faster hardware-based position triangulation than plain software-based guesstimation by Wi-Fi signal strength.

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