The cell network is way easier to track your movements with than WiFi hotspots.
Also check out SimpleX.
Discussion
Yea cell networks are big bottleneck/threat for tracking, I think burners with 2/3g will reduce accuracy and can easily be switched off by removing battery. Also maybe lower accuracy (?). Problem remains that # are still required for a lot of things day to day.
Elon says he's going off telcom, I don't see how that's realistic for 99% of people tbh
Do you know if a smartphone, say <5 years old, without SIM card, can still be targeted / tracked? Does it still send / receive packets, my guess is yes because you can make emergency calls but I haven't tested.
Does SimpleX use decentralized/federated servers. If signal would allow that (which they absolutely won't) it would be great. Plenty of messenger apps, problem (and a major one) is to get people on them.
GrapheneOS devs claim when airplane mode is on, all the radios on the device are dead. People make use of this to try to stay as anonymous as possible by only connecting through Tor and WiFi spots. I would imagine this should apply to all Android devices, but I wouldn't count on it with an extreme threat model... Recommend researching yourself on a device an OS basis. The baseband rabbit hole is quite wild.
SimpleX uses a relay server model with no metadata including user identifiers. Self-hosting is possible, but not necessarily beneficial for privacy imo. Tor is well supported. Read the website, it's all pretty well explained there.
The app does still need some polish for mainstream appeal though, but it's getting there... Beating the network effect will of course be the biggest hurdle, but it's the messenger with the most potential for such that I've seen so far.