How could Google Latitude find my exact PC location with no GPS or public wifi?

Posted by Mike on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Mike
Published on 2011-06-20T20:23:39Z Indexed on 2011/06/21 0:24 UTC
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I found a similar question here but I still don't get it.

You see, I live in a small town and every time I check my IP location via online services or speed test websites, my location appears to be my ISP server location (which in my case is 250 miles away). But when I tried Google latitude, it pinpointed my exact location within less than 100 meters!

I use Windows Vista, Google Chrome, and when I got the message that "Google is trying to locate you", I agreed just to check what the result will be. It was scary, very scary!

What I've come up after reading the above link is that Google have a kind of extensive WiFi database locations. That could be understandable with the case of public and open WiFis that are used with a lot of people. Some of them might be using applications that could gather location data and somehow this information ends up in giant Google databases. From those, Google could pinpoint a WiFi location based on its MAC address along with these bits of info that have been gathered via various sources.

The issue here is that my WiFi is private, I don't even broadcast my WiFi name. So how on earth did Google find my exact PC location?

Please break down the answer in layman's terms as possible.

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