And the "Sign Into Chrome" feature slurps up all your history, cookies, etc. in a form Google can read and which their terms allow them to data-mine, unless you know to dig into the settings and configure a separate encryption key.

Isn't that necessary for Sign Into Chrome? The whole point is that you can transfer your history/cookies across browsers.

Firefox manages to sync just fine while automatically encrypting data end-to-end.

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.