Help me out, explain this. I was walking around in Manhattan the other day when one of my neighbors in D.C. call me on my cell phone. Afterward, I began to think about it: how did Verizon know where to route the call? Did they have every cell phone tower in the U.S. ping my phone until they got a response, or was my phone constantly sending out a signal telling Verizon what cell I was in. I decided it must be the latter, and there must therefore be a possible record of everywhere that cell phone had been, GPS or no.
Your phone sends a query to cell towers periodically. That’s how they know to route calls to that particular tower.
You would think it would take some time to do that, and in electronic terms it does, but it's only seconds to us. These new switches are very fast.
Yes, the police investigators use this info all the time to trace peoples movements. They don't know exactly where you are but can pinpoint it within a square mile or less, depending on how many cell towers there are and which ones you switch to. The phone does this automatically to maintain a good connection. This has nothing to do with GPS.
In some cases like emergency recoveries, they can ping the phone, the phone will answer and they can triangulate the signal to a precise location.
If one were really wanting to stay under the radar, so to speak, one would not have a cell phone in their possession.