A common view in these discussions is that people are happy for Google to collect data about them, and other users, because they have an excellent track record in security.

You can't have privacy without security, but security by itself does not equal privacy.

The best security in the world doesn't mean that you have privacy if everything you do online is tracked. And no company arguably tracks you more than Google. The volume of tracking data they collect about users is mind-bogglingly gargantuan in scale.

It's baffling how Google escapes scrutiny on their data collection practices, particularly from the tech community who seem happy to give Google a free pass on matters of privacy and online tracking.

You can also set your phone to airplane mode with WiFi and Bluetooth enabled most of the time unless you need 4g for something like driving directions.

Google has much better security than the phone companies anyway, so letting the phone companies know where you are is bad enough.

I had the idea to "red team" myself and find out if there's a way of finding out my location history from shady online data broker and then take countermeasures.

Google knows the GPS location of almost every Wifi router, even if nobody has ever (successfully) connected to it with location services. By design, Android will search all Wifi SSID's and send the GPS coordinates back to Google, so that if another phone not using location services connects to that router, Google knows their location by cross-referencing with the stored GPS coordinates.

Unfortunately, we can't even entirely trust our phones then either. You can turn on airplane mode in the OS, but it could still choose to reactivate the radio for short bursts without you knowing. Or the the radio could be set to phone home on a regular basis on its own recognizance. This could potentially occur even if the phone is turned off.

There is no way to ever completely trust a cellular device.

This would be easy to check by checking radio signals emitted for the phone. This might be an expensive experiment to set up, but easy to check.

Only by design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10985599

Great concept. Why hasn't anybody done this yet?

I'll get to it in my case but really this is on the providers; they designed the protocol backwards. Instead of each customer hacking in a PBX it would be trivial to ping the last known area and then if the phone didn't respond in n (customer configurable) sec send a broader incoming call request ultimately resulting in an all areas ping, or even queue one up like a missed SMS but they would rather monetize your high frequency all-time location data that they pretend to not care about.

Hopping out of "airplane mode" can be made arb fast.

So, short answer, customer demand. I bet eventually they will get too creepy with the data and demand will happen.