A lot of people confuse "GPS" with "moving map software". I had a neighbor once say "My work's address is wrong on the GPS". There is likely nothing wrong with the GPS signal. It's just that the map data in the area may be known to be incorrect.
The article also places a big emphasis on people driving to the incorrect locations, hundreds of miles away from their intended destination. To me, this is a user error rather than a system issue. Every GPS system has the user confirm their destination address to keep this from happening.
My understanding is that it might be the gps system sending fake data, not being shut down or completely scrambled. So you might not know you are wrong.
The "travelling" part sounds like it could be an artifact of your GPS receiver interpolating between two vastly different location points, and interpreting that as moving between them -- at impossible speed/angle. So a single wildly wrong location could be enough to cause this.
I have it happen to me over and over again when Waze has my GPS coordinates. Its uncertainty is on the level of where I am in my house, and not which town I'm in.
GPS is not typically used to confirm a position that is known accurately by other means, and that is not its purpose. Only in those cases where there is a manifest conflict with independent spatial information will the problem be evident.
People have certainly done some dumb things in the GPS vein. That said, if you're taking confident navigation directions from either a person or a computer, it can be hard to make a split-second decision that something "doesn't seem right." (Obviously some of the more extreme cases still shouldn't happen.)
It absolutely is a bug! The app has decided that you're driving a car, which is false: you aren't. Because of this falsehood, it is reporting a different location from where you actually are, through no fault of GPS.
It could be that the requirements specification for the program requires these falsehoods. In that case, the specification has a bug.
>GPS is not typically used to confirm a position that is known accurately by other means
I am not so sure about that. The most common use of GPS is in satnav in cars. Satnavs typically show a map, and typically it is very easy to confirm your position on a map. Any inaccuracy by more than the usual few meters would be quickly noticed by the majority of GPS users.
GPS jamming is becoming an increasing problem around Europe, so "your GPS is wrong" has other common meanings.
https://gpsjam.org
reply