Turning off location services feels decisive and addresses one source among several. A phone reports its position through multiple independent mechanisms, and they are held by different parties under different rules.
Understanding which is which matters, because a measure that stops applications from reading position does nothing about the record the network operator is already keeping.
The sources, and who holds each
| Source | Typical precision | Held by |
|---|---|---|
| Cell tower association | Tens of metres to kilometres | Network operator |
| Satellite positioning | A few metres | Applications granted access |
| Nearby wireless networks | Metres, indoors too | Platform and applications |
| Short range beacons | Within a room | Venue and partner services |
| Network address | City, sometimes closer | Every service contacted |
| Photograph metadata | A few metres | Whoever receives the file |
Only the second and third rows are controlled by the permission most people think of as the location setting. The first happens as a condition of the phone working at all.
The network knows first
A phone must register with towers to receive calls, and the operator records which tower served it and when. That log exists independently of any setting on the device and cannot be disabled while the phone remains connected.
Precision is lower than satellite positioning and is not as low as often assumed. In dense areas with many small cells, tower association narrows position considerably, and combining sequential records reconstructs a route.
Wireless scanning is the quiet one
Phones determine position indoors by observing nearby wireless network names and signal strengths and comparing them against a database of known network locations.
This works with satellite positioning unavailable and, on many devices, continues while wireless connectivity appears switched off, because scanning for positioning is treated separately from connecting. It is the mechanism behind accurate indoor location, and it is the least visible of the sources.
The collector is usually not the application
An application requesting location often does not process it. Embedded components supplied by advertising and analytics companies do, and those components report to their own servers rather than to the application's developer.
One granted permission can therefore supply several companies, none of which the user chose, and the same component appears across many unrelated applications, which is how a single vendor assembles a continuous trace from intermittent access.
Anonymised location is not anonymous
Location datasets are commonly shared with identifiers removed, and the removal accomplishes less than it appears to.
A trace shows where a device rests overnight and where it spends working hours. Those two points together identify a specific person in the great majority of cases, and no name was required to do it. Re-identification from a small number of location points is well established rather than theoretical.
History is a stored product, not a byproduct
Several platforms retain a continuous location history as a feature, presented as a timeline the user can review. That record is far more revealing than any single position, because it describes routine rather than presence.
It is also a dataset that can be queried by others. Requests to identify every device present in a given area during a given period rely on exactly this retained history, which means the record exists to be searched rather than only to be shown to its owner.
Where the feature can be disabled, doing so prevents the accumulation rather than merely hiding the display, and the two settings are not always the same control.
What actually reduces it
Grant location only while an application is in use, and audit which applications hold it, since the list usually contains several with no functional need. Disable wireless scanning for positioning where the platform allows it separately from connectivity. Strip coordinates from photographs before sharing them.
Accept that the network operator's record continues regardless. That one is addressed by not carrying the device, which is a different category of decision and worth stating honestly rather than implying a setting exists for it.
Note: the useful question is not whether location is on. It is which of the six sources above is active, who receives each, and whether the record they build persists after the moment it was collected.