Nice thing is that tracking via cellular never stops working but if you are in an emergency they will not call emergency services for you if you don't pay the subscription.
It's good to read this thread and know that finally people are realizing the full extent of the surveillance. I have dealt with a Govt agency targeting me for several years and having technical knowledge, I've noticed all of this invasion of privacy and control used against me, lots of it wouldn't even be possible without technology or the internet. But it's so much more than if you gave up your phone... It's a literal surveillance state and even if you go to the suburbs away from the concrete prisons our cities have been turned into, you still have front door cameras everywhere, accessible by law enforcement.
In fact, to abuse all of this stuff and weaponize it against someone, you do not need to have a court order or a warrant. As long as you find the right people, have the right narrative, companies will do all kinds of stuff to you, even if you are a customer.
And my original reply before going off on a tangent was that even if you remove your sim card, even if you somehow disable emergency services, your phone is still pinging and leaking all these signals that are picked up by all kinds of scanners.
Very few people even accept this is happening at scale, let alone are able to reason about the implications of it all.
The public needs a better job of being informed about the consequences of all of it.
I agree with the worry about surveillance. But isn't this really a continuation of how car makers treat their customers and the public generally. Cars companies comprimise privacy in the same way that they willingly comprimise safety, public health and the environment. It is the result of a broken culture and naive to expect them to change.
I think it's a mistake to frame it that way. Collecting and selling data is essentially ubiquitous among companies with access to harvestable data. ISPs, cell providers, smart tv manufacturers, and so on are not broadly associated with some specific historic cultural or urban planning failing. They're companies with access to an additional revenue stream, and nearly any company that can will make the same decision.
Clearly your data are more important than you