Your points on the actual details of what how cellphones work is exactly right, but it’s trivial to calculate location from those values. My point was that your

Your points on the actual details of what how cellphones work is exactly right, but it’s trivial to calculate location from those values. My point was that your phone is not powering up any additional hardware, or doing anything extra in software to burn battery life to estimate your location, the information is already there. The phones application processor is already monitoring them if only to keep your radio strength meter display accurate. And Google should encourage you to keep GPS on if they do a good job managing its power usage. Users aren’t always going to know when the app they are using is going to work better with more precise location data. This is a user friendly feature. Circling back around, the author is still wrong that allowing installed apps to run unrestricted background network processes is anything like the OS carefully managing location accesses to minimize power usage.