Earlier quoted context omitted.
When signed out, Google maps' initial view is entirely based on IP address. Sure, they could use cookies, but they don't. They could also use device profiling, but they don't. The IP -> location mapping is googles secret sauce, but it collects data from a lot of places, and is for most users very accurate. We're talking street level accuracy in many cases. The data you or another user feeds into it you could easily g…
Anecdote about a bad case: I was in Barcelona for Mobile World Congress a couple years back and Google insisted I was in Milan, because the rental wifi was from there (I assume).
I was at CCC in Berlin a couple of years back, the conference network was assigned a subnet previously used in Russia - I was getting verification emails from services I use for months after.