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Asking from a place of ignorance, not argument:

Is opting out of physical location tracking expensive? I just checked on my Pixel and was able to find a setting which ostensibly can disable location services after a few seconds of searching through settings.

What am I missing here?

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Even if you shut off GPS, your cell provider can trivially triangulate your position with acceptable precision based on your signal strength and ping response times.

(Also, many Cell Service Providers have a backchannel API that websites can use to geolocate the source of a connection given an IP + Port)

You'll need to turn off the cellular modem to prevent network level location triangulation. At which point it's not really a cellphone any more.

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