Is there a verifiable way to determine someone's location? I'm not talking about phones or Ingress, because I know this can be spoofed with rooted phones and careful "traveling" of your fake GPS coordinates. But what if the game was set up in a way that required photos to be taken of the surrounding area to match (but not exactly match) existing photos? That could be bypassed, but it'd be an additional annoyance. What about sending surrounding WiFi access points or nearby phone IDs to the server as a means of verification? That is worse for privacy and again could be spoofed. Thinking bigger, what if the game could only be played with satellite phones, and the satellite would send the location of the transceiver to the server? Would be harder to spoof unless you own physical devices left in different parts of the world.
Are there even any sattelite systems available to the general public that can track objects on the ground? GPS can't, they're one way. Satellite phone systems would know which satellite the phone is connected to, but would they get any more information than that?
I'm not sure there's any realistic way to do this.
If a satellite phone is connecting to multiple satellites (or at least multiple satellites can receive its signal, even if communication is not two way), something akin to GPS in reverse seems viable.
