Law enforcement can triangulate location from a mobile phone signal via your celluar network provider with or without Google's help, and has been able to do so since the very beginning.
"On May 28th, Lisa Marie Roberts, of Portland, Oregon, was released from prison after serving nine and a half years for a murder she didn’t commit. A key piece of overturned evidence was cell-phone records that allegedly put her at the scene."
If it's as accurate and straight forward as law enforcement tell us - how did _that_ happen?
Bingo, knowing the location of each phone at all times is intrinsic to how the cellular network works.
The interesting question here is why law enforcement is going to Google instead of the cellular network providers directly? By definition, they're missing out on data from all non-Android phones.
From the top comment here: The precision is greatest when GPS is on, but less precise data from cell towers and WiFi sources is used almost any time a Google app is being used on an Android or non-Android phone.
I haven't read the original article since the website doesn't work without off-domain scripts running, but I assume that's why - they do have data for iOS users running Google apps, and that data is often higher resolution than cell tower triangulation. I'd also assume they're getting the cell information as well and correlating the two.
