> virtually every mobile app
Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
Reminder to readers to use F-Droid
You can still install other proprietary location harvesting apps on your phone. If you do so, you are just minimizing the number of data harvesters.
To ensure nobody but you knows where you are: 1. Have only safe apps installed. 2. An OS that does not send your location to Google, Apple, or others 3. Your SIM must not be transmitting to the Telco's. This means no SIM or airplane mode.
Having no SIM does not help you conceal your phone's location at all, only perhaps to make it harder to map it to your identity.
I don't know if any location data might leak in airplane mode, but I would not be surprised if some did, for example, through NFC or Bluetooth.
Not sure about NFC, but at least BT gets disabled in airplane mode.
WIFI triangulation or bluetooth mesh can be used for location tracking in particular areas. MAC address randomization and generic phone ID makes this more difficult, but broadcasts of known devices in WIFI or bluetooth scanning can give you away.
Others may know more than me on this.
I didn't know that, that's really smart and so simple. I like it. I don't know why such trivial thing is so amazing to me.
Which is why hardware kill switches are the future (see Librem 5 and Pinephone).
The worlds worst privacy offenders make/sell phones. Google. Samsung. Apple.
Google, no need to explain.
Samsung? All their apps, their keyboard, collect, collect collect.
Apple? Walled garden of share data with Apple.
And beyond this, for example on Samsung builds, the GPS daemon calls home(Qualcomm? looked into it a year ago...) to update agps data, but also... provide tracking info.
None of these people want hardware kill switches.
Unless you wrap that phone in a Faraday sleeve, what you mentioned does not prevent tracking.
Any f-droid app that depends on location uses the standard android location APIs. That means you're submitting what RF networks (mobile and wifi) are visible, and Google then passes back an approximate location. Once you have a good GPS lock, the same data is submitted to Google again for inclusion in their database.
If you avoid installing Google Play services, you'll have to use a framework like microG that re-implements the Google APIs. microG lets you plug in a number of backends, with a default of sending the same data to Mozilla Location Services instead of Google. You can easily turn this off and use local-only location providers that either build their own database any time you have a GPS lock, or use downloads from opencellid.
Significantly, there is very little overlap in the apps available on f-droid and the apps available on the google play store. Most play store apps siphon data, and most f-droid apps don't.
at least with google play you know they're selling your data so can adjust your behaviour accordingly.