The devil is in the geotagging

First of all, Instagram’s photo map service uses whatever data the user feeds it—and that data is not always accurate.

There is no way one can prove what device Sotkin used to geotag his location, or if he enabled GPS. However, we do know that GPS is not the only way to get a user’s location.

GPS is usually highly accurate. But when it’s not available and there are no Wi-Fi hotspots nearby, the phone will always switch to the next best thing — cell phone tower triangulation. This is the means by which a cell phone contacts nearby cell phone towers in order to pinpoint its own position.

A cell phone tower has three antennas arranged in a triangle. Each antenna covers a radius of 120 degrees. This way, a cell phone tower can always tell from which direction a cell phone is communicating from.

After establishing contact, a cell phone can make an educated guess as to its location using a combination of signal strength and the overall distance between itself and the tower. If there is more than one tower in range, then the phone will communicate with them as well and use the results to triangulate where it is.

The more towers there are, the more accurate the result.

While ingenious, this method doesn’t come without downsides. The fewer towers there are, or the more distance between the phone and the tower, then the accuracy with which your device can approximate its location falls dramatically. If there is only one tower nearby, then the best hope is a basic distance calculation from the tower to the device.

There’s another problem. Eastern Ukraine isn’t covered with decent cell phone infrastructure. A check of Ukraine’s top three cell phone providers —Life, Kyivstar and MTS—shows that coverage in the countryside to the east and north of Luhansk is patchy, at best.

This suggests the possibility that much of the population in that area is being served by fewer cell phone towers than would normally be acceptable in urban areas.