It’s not entirely clear that the location stuff is related to North Korea. A lot of the heavily restrictive laws are done under the guise of privacy.
It’s funny how the two things you mentioned are related to a particular quagmire of mine which was that my baby son misplaced my phone inside our place in Korea. I had absolutely zero way of finding it. I didn’t want to buy a shutter-compromised phone so I just waited a month to buy a phone in the US.
It’s just absolutely bizarre that, in this modern age, an iPhone briefly going out of sight means losing it forever. (I think he threw the phone away, as he started to enjoy putting things in the trash can.)