A modern smartphone uses navigational satellites—sometimes drawing from multiple orbital systems—as well as cellular towers, Bluetooth hints, and Wi-Fi router locations to produce an awfully precise location. My family’s iPhones are often tracked not just at our house but—when looking in the Find My app—to each of our nearly exactly locations in our home within a few feet.
That might be too much when you’re giving a third-party app your location even once, but especially whenever the app is in the foreground, or, for rare apps, continuously in the background. In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, Apple added a switch to let you choose to offer either precision or “fuzzed” locations to apps—and by extension to any third parties that the apps might work with, who receive location information as well.
