Your understanding is not correct. iPhones have never kept track of your location and travel, beyond what all cell phones do by law. Find My (which your current phone has) will show YOU the location of your phone when you ask. And if its battery is low Apple will save the last seen location (if you enable this feature). But it does not track the phone other than these. iOS 14 has an added “crowd source” feature that you can optionally turn on. If you put the phone in Lost mode it will report its location to other iOS devices that come within Bluetooth range. But those devices simply forward the encrypted ID of your phone to Apple, who then forwards it to you. No one (not Apple, not the owner of the forwarding phone) knows which device was detected except for you.
There’s also a feature in iOS 14 that lets you block apps and websites from knowing the ID of your device, so they can’t share it with other websites and apps. A lot of sites try to bribe you with free features if you disable this feature; it’s a question of how much you are willing to sell your soul.
One way that businesses track you is to note the Wi-Fi address of your phone as you come within range of their networks. Apple has fixed this also; your phone “lies” about it’s Wi-Fi address, and provides a different Wi-Fi address each time it is “asked”. You can disable this feature also if you truly want to be tracked.
On the general subject of tracking:
- Your carrier knows the location of your phone all the time, even if you turn off location services, because it can triangulate from the towers that receive your phone’s periodic “I’m here” ping. They are required by law to do this to support E911. They upload this information to databases where your location and whereabouts are known to law enforcement and any business that cares to know where you are.
- License plate scanners are ubiquitous, in police vehicles and repo trucks. And also along limited access highways, toll roads, bridges and tunnels. And every time your plate is scanned it goes into a location database accessible to law enforcement and any business that wants to pay for access.
- Electronic toll tags are obviously used every time you use a toll facility, but transponders are located everywhere along highways for traffic control. Have you see signs that display how long it will take to get to an upcoming milepost? Where do you think they get that information?
- Do you use public Wi-Fi, your cable provider’s hotspots or the “free” convenient Wi-Fi networks in malls and stores? Did you think that your location wasn’t tracked by those?
- See those cameras in stores, malls and other public places? Have you heard about facial recognition?
- Did you ever post your picture in Shutterfly?
- Do you have a Transit Pass account?
- Do you use an urban bicycle rental like New York’s CitiBike? Have you noticed that your usage history shows the location and time you picked up the bike and likewise when you dropped it off?
- Do you use credit cards in stores? Did you know that the location where you use a card is recorded in a worldwide central database, ostensibly to detect card fraud through what’s called a “velocity check” (AKA as the “superman test”)?
- Have you heard of iBeacon? It’s a feature that tracks and reports the location of any device that has Bluetooth enabled on a device.
Apple is about the only business in the world that does NOT track you.
