Selective Availability ends and civilian accuracy jumps

For its first two decades of civilian use, GPS had deliberately degraded accuracy for non-military users, keeping typical civilian position errors around 100 meters even though the underlying technology was capable of far better. President Clinton ordered this deliberate degradation, called Selective Availability, switched off entirely. Civilian accuracy improved to roughly 10 meters overnight, without any new satellites or hardware changes, purely by removing an artificial limitation. That single policy decision is what made consumer GPS devices and, later, the location features in smartphones actually useful for things like street-level navigation, rather than only telling you roughly which neighborhood you were in.