Most consumer Android phones come with Google Play Services installed by default. Note that that is a completely different thing than the Google Play Store. It's intentionally branded to be confusing and sound like it has something to do with applications. Google Play Services is an entire closed-source operating system living above the kernel, but has hooks all the way down, into every subsystem. It offers a ton of juicy APIs to make Android development "easier", but one of the things that it does (called Google Location Services, or GLS) is interpose between GPS and other ways of location and offer a location API to applications, becoming the location provider for the device. All requests for location go through it.
GLS has scary[1] privacy implications and you cannot uninstall it. You can disable most of the scary stuff it does by not agreeing to use "high accuracy" mode for location, aka "device only". You must "consent" to this data collection because Google's lawyers believe this consent dialog meets legal requirements for this data collection. Their verbiage is horribly vague and absolutely does not communicate what data collection you are agreeing to by enabling this mode. It calls this data "anonymous" but location data, particularly traces, is anything but anonymous. At the high resolution of GPS these days, it cannot be anonymized.
[1] by "scary", I actually mean absolutely dystopian.
> GLS has scary privacy implications and you cannot uninstall it.
I have an Android without Google Location Services, the alternative location service is a Mozilla backend instead. I doubt that's much better for privacy and more likely stands out like a red flag to the Data Hoover collection agencies, but it is certainly possible to not use GLS.
I've only come across one small app that didn't play well with the Mozilla backend.
Yup. Unfortunately we're training children and college students to accept this. OS vendors are now effectively pseudo governments due to this kind of thing.
"On most Android devices, Google, as the network location provider, provides a location service called Google Location Services (GLS), known in Android 9 and above as Google Location Accuracy. This service aims to provide a more accurate device location and generally improve location accuracy. Most mobile phones are equipped with GPS, which uses signals from satellites to determine a device’s location – however, with Google Location Services, additional information from nearby Wi-Fi, mobile networks, and device sensors can be collected to determine your device’s location. It does this by periodically collecting location data from your device and using it in an anonymous way to improve location accuracy."
Consider the implications of Google collecting "anonymous" data from billions of Android phones. The technical details of scale, regularity, which sensors, their resolution, etc are highly germane here, but unfortunately not public. This is a very large blind spot in public scrutiny IMHO.
GLS has scary[1] privacy implications and you cannot uninstall it. You can disable most of the scary stuff it does by not agreeing to use "high accuracy" mode for location, aka "device only". You must "consent" to this data collection because Google's lawyers believe this consent dialog meets legal requirements for this data collection. Their verbiage is horribly vague and absolutely does not communicate what data collection you are agreeing to by enabling this mode. It calls this data "anonymous" but location data, particularly traces, is anything but anonymous. At the high resolution of GPS these days, it cannot be anonymized.
[1] by "scary", I actually mean absolutely dystopian.