... people with to whom I choose to send things. I do not choose (or rather, I wish I could choose not to) send a ton of detailed information about my phone. my location, etc. to a bunch of unknown companies and people. I feel like I must be misunderstanding your point?
If you send a message to someone, or open a website, then necessarily you interact with a directory service (a telephone company, the message client's directory, DNS, etc).
For iMessage, apple's servers then route the message to the appropriate account, and their various documentation on this says they don't record anything more than necessary (I assume each account has a glorified mailbox in which the encrypted messages are stored - there is no part of iMessage that can be decrypted by someone other than the recipient, except the destination - in an ideal world the sender would be stripped once its in the mailbox).
If you load a webpage over https then no party in the middle knows what resources you pulled - alas they know the host because DNS queries aren't encrypted, and even if they were the IP addresses aren't, so with enough data it might be possible to infer destination for pages in hosting sites.
None of these include your location information - beyond IP based inferences.
The only people who have your location without explicitly asking is the carrier, and only because they can see you bouncing around towers
Metadata makes it an impossible wish. The act of sending or receiving anything provides companies the detailed information(phone, location, etc.) that you're trying to keep secret. Carriers like Verizon/AT&T/T-Mobile also sell users location data outright.
