propwash

I'll pull on this thread, if we're talking about Android. All apps and services on an Android phone are not created equally. If you're writing apps as a non-Google employee, you're using the public Android SDK. Google employees write apps using both the public SDK as well as having access to private calls made to Google Play Services, which you could think of as a root-level service running in the background. If you turn off location services, non-Google apps won't see your location. Google Play Services will still have access to location services and other Google apps can request these data through Google Play Services. The way to avoid this is by using a Google-free version of AOSP or using GrapheneOS, which sandboxes Google Play Services and allows you to truly turn off location services to all apps and services running on your phone.