At this point, your device is not giving anyone your location without explicit permission. So it really just comes down to your IP Address, which services do need.

I think your is statement is inaccurate to the point of being intentionally misleading:

Many devices, when running, and in some cases even if turned off but connected to their battery, will ping cell towers (maybe even BLE/Wifi) and get triangulated by the network infrastructure (such as cell towers) without actively broadcasting the GPS location.

That's why I don't quite understand why the gubernment needs to have finer grained data (esp around the US/Mexican border). Precision location info would only be needed if you need to track people in densely populated areas.

IP Address is all you need to get fairly accurate (town or neighborhood) location for most of North America.

But it is necessary to send it somewhere, otherwise the internet wouldn't work.

Unfortunately it seems to have become accepted for our devices to communicate constantly and often with services we never explicitly started communication with (like Ad networks used in Apps).

Permission systems on devices should care about Network connections just as much as Location. Ideally when installing an app you'd get the list of domains it requests to communicate with, and you could toggle them. Bonus points if the app store made it a requirement to identify which Domains are third parties and the category like an Ad service.

Then you are obligated to obscure that with a trusted no-log VPN too.