Using a smartphone off the grid
I am planning to use a smartphone as a media player and maybe to read the occasional ebook or pdf.
If I were to turn off all connectivity, e.g., bluetooth, wifi, gps, then remove the sim card and/or put it in airplane mode, is there still a way the phone can be tracked? Is a phone with no sim card in or in airplane mode still visible to cell towers/IMSI catchers?
I'm aware that GPS receivers can only receive and do not send data. How does a smartphone use the GPS data received to track a user's location. I would like to know because after having turned off or disabled all unnecessary background apps, I found that I am unable to permanently force stop or disable some location and bluetooth apps that run in the background.
Would switching to something like LineageOS or Replicant (without reinstalling Play Store or any Google apps) help fix this? How free are OS' like these from Google's code/data-collecting?
If I were to use wifi with no other connectivity enabled and routed the internet traffic to tor through a transparent proxy, should that be enough for anonymous casual browsing?
