Help! 'What is My Location?' web tool's geolocation thinks I'm on Mars, not earth.

hey everyone,

so, our little 'What is My Location?' web tool, which is supposed to be a straightforward location finder, has decided to get a bit… celestial. lately, its geolocation feature has been acting like it's auditioning for a sci-fi movie, placing users in positions that are ridiculously wrong. we're talking middle of the ocean, sahara desert, or sometimes, literally coordinates that would put them somewhere near mars, not earth.

it's a pretty recent issue, and users are understandably confused why our location finder thinks they're on a deep-sea expedition or exploring an alien planet instead of their actual living room. we've tried a bunch of things to debug this:

• browser permissions: confirmed, double-checked, and triple-checked that browser location permissions are granted. no issues there, users are accepting them.

• api keys: google maps and geocoding API keys are all valid and not rate-limited. we even regenerated a couple just to be sure.

• network/proxy interference: tried testing through various VPNs and direct connections to rule out any weird ISP or proxy shenanigans. no consistent pattern emerged.

• cross-browser/device testing: safari, chrome, firefox, edge, mobile, desktop… the problem persists across the board, though not always consistently for every user, which is the really frustrating part.

the weirdest thing is how the browser's native navigator.geolocation seems to be misbehaving. it's like it's having an existential crisis. we're often getting timeout errors or 'user denied' messages in the console, even when the user definitely allowed location access and their internet is fine. it’s not always a hard fail, sometimes it just returns incredibly inaccurate coordinates, like a default fallback or something.

here's a snippet of what we're occasionally seeing in the console logs when it goes rogue:

GeolocationPositionError {code: 3, message: "User denied geolocation access or timed out.", PERMISSION_DENIED: 1, POSITION_UNAVAILABLE: 2, TIMEOUT: 3}
    at <anonymous>:1:15

// or sometimes just wildly off coordinates
GeolocationPosition {coords: GeolocationCoordinates, timestamp: 1678886400000}
    coords: GeolocationCoordinates {latitude: 0, longitude: 0, accuracy: 20000000, altitude: null, altitudeAccuracy: null, heading: null, speed: null}
    timestamp: 1678886400000

what common pitfalls could cause such erratic geolocation behavior when it seems the browser itself is giving bad data or misinterpreting the permission? and how do you effectively debug this when the standard checks aren't revealing anything obvious?