I mean..it's a Cell Phone. The "cell" part of it means that you move between different "cells" which correspond to different towers, so that the carrier can best route your call. Even feature phones tracked your location in this way, it's used in criminal cases sometimes.
Ah yes, which explains why my Android phone suddenly stopped working after Google apologized and removed the functionality described in the article.
That the phone has to connect to nearby cell towers is obvious. That this information needs to be sent not to the cell company but to the OS company without an option to turn it off is bad programming or something worse.
