You don’t have any control over the function except to remove the battery. Your phone is tracking you all the time.
It save the battery life as well so I do disable it and no, the GPS in my Blackberry is not turned on unless I want it on.
I want to get into some of the technical aspects of this issue.
There are two services that a smart phone has that are part of the phone's OS and are accessible to the user on a Blackberry.
There is the GPS chip that actually does the work, and there is a service that turns the chip on or off, or controls when and where the chip is needed. You can turn off the GPS, but without disabling the program service, different apps can turn it on for you. If you disable both the chip and the service, the chip will not turn on with one exception and this is the 911 call. The government demanded that this system work and it cannot be turned off however it only works if 911 is called. That action bypasses any settings and the service turns the chip on so that the 911 operator can locate the phone.
The only other way to locate you and it would not be very accurate, would be to know about where you are so the cell tower could be located. The phone could be pinged and the reply ping could be triangulated. This is done often enough, but you must know the general vicinity first.
As to the GPS, that baby ain't turning on unless I tell it too. I have both the GPS and the service that controls it turned off. The only way it turns on is to physically dial 911.