K8y
Does having GoS on airplane mode while on wifi (and disabling location & mobile plan) prevent your phone pinging cell towers? Phones are always pinging towers, which can triangulate to locate you.
Yes. See:
Activating airplane mode will fully disable the cellular radio transmit and receive capabilities, which will prevent your phone from being reached from the cellular network and stop your carrier (and anyone impersonating them to you) from tracking the device via the cellular radio. The baseband implements other functionality such as Wi-Fi and GPS functionality, but each of these components is separately sandboxed on the baseband and independent of each other. Enabling airplane mode disables the cellular radio, but Wi-Fi can be re-enabled and used without activating the cellular radio again. This allows using the device as a Wi-Fi only device.
source: https://grapheneos.org/faq#cellular-tracking
Then again the wifi itself can track you too, according to wifi-scanning. Does GoS know about this too...and how to prevent location pinging/tracking?
See:
Wi-Fi on GrapheneOS is very privacy-friendly and is essentially anonymous as long as apps do not leak uniquely identifying information to the network. GrapheneOS avoids allowing itself to be fingerprinted as GrapheneOS, other than connections which are documented (see the default connections FAQ) and can be easily disabled or forced through a VPN service.
[...]
MAC randomization is always performed for Wi-Fi scanning. Pixel phones have firmware support for scanning MAC randomization going significantly beyond a naive implementation. On many other devices, there are identifiers exposed by Wi-Fi scanning beyond the MAC address such as the packet sequence number and assorted identifying information in the probe requests.
[...]
Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning for improving location detection are disabled by default, unlike the stock OS. These can be toggled in Settings > Location > Location services > Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning. These features enable scanning even when Wi-Fi or Bluetooth is disabled, so these need to be kept disabled to fully disable the radios when Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are disabled.
source: https://grapheneos.org/usage#wifi-privacy
The sources I have cited contain further helpful information. This forum also offers many helpful posts on similar topics. Searching for keywords such as “airplane mode,” “cellular tracking,” and “WiFi scanning” should bring up relevant posts you perhaps find useful too.