I’m not the person who found it originally, but I understand how they did it. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.
The upper BK in Malaysia is not censored, so we have its exact location.
Find a place in Italy that is 9792 km away using the Measure Distance tool on something like Google Maps.
Even though there are potentially multiple valid locations in Italy, we know you’re within 2.6 km of another BK. Florence is sensible because there are BKs near the 9792 km mark.
Once we do that, we can find a spot that is both 9792 km from Malaysia BK and 2.6 km from a nearby BK on a street called “Via”, effectively finding where the image was taken.
It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle of how your GPS works. It’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.
Yes a bit lucky but just draw the 9xxx km circle around the MY BK and then I saw the circle go straight through Florence (also Bologna was a likely candidate). Then find a BK within 2.6 km with a fairly long street name and draw a circle, it intersects with the other circle in two places. The obvious one was the parking near Piazzale M.
I can also get the GPS coordinates at all times from your phone so it was easy to verify I was right.
WTF??? How did you extract that even if I censored it
I’m surprised 🤯 😂
I’m not the person who found it originally, but I understand how they did it. We have three useful data points: you are 2.6 km from Burger King in Italy, that BK is on a street called "Via " and you are 9792 km from Burger King in Malaysia.
It’s not perfect but it works well! This is the principle of how your GPS works. It’s called triangulation. We only had distance to two points and one of them doesn’t tell us the sub-kilometer distance. If we had distance to three points, we could find your EXACT location, within some error depending on how detailed the distance information was.
Good explanation. Just a tiny detail: “via” in Italian literally means “street”, so not much info there.
Oops. Good to know… I guess the main thing was simply that there was a BK in the right place relative to the 9792 km arc then.
Isn’t the 9792 street distance though rather than a straight line?
I’m not sure Italy and Malaysia is connected by road
Yes a bit lucky but just draw the 9xxx km circle around the MY BK and then I saw the circle go straight through Florence (also Bologna was a likely candidate). Then find a BK within 2.6 km with a fairly long street name and draw a circle, it intersects with the other circle in two places. The obvious one was the parking near Piazzale M.
I can also get the GPS coordinates at all times from your phone so it was easy to verify I was right.
Can also make guesses as to where you’re from as well bc not too many languages spell it Malesia
edit: looks like Finland, for example, spells it like that, plus the Italia lines up as well