this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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Privacy
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Last I checked airplane mode does not disable GPS as it is a passive service. The phone will track your movement and then send it all next time you connect.
You must know something I don’t.
AFAIK, GPS works by fetching signals from satellites.
If you disable your Bluetooth/wifi antenna, you won’t know your relative location to other devices. If you disable your cellular antenna, you won’t know your relative location to cell towers. I presume that you would need some of that data to know your position relative to satellites but maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it receives data from satellites directly? Seems unlikely
Yes, GPS works by measuring your distance from several GPS satellites (based on the timing of the signals they send). If a few distances are known, it narrows it down to a point (the satellite orbits are known so you know where they are at any time).
I've owned several stand-alone GPS receivers before phones started to include the feature.
You can download offline maps to phones so that you can navigate without any phone signal.