Hey fsflover, I'm not sure how answering your question "How can I avoid that?" is moving goalposts. My answer stands — don't use a phone if you don't want your location captured and shared.

It's trivial to turn off Location Services on an iPhone, in which case your location data isn't sent to Apple. You can also control this on an application-by-application basis if you wish. However, this doesn't stop your carrier from capturing and sharing your location data.

Hopefully this clears it up for you.

>> But why do they have to know your phone number and location? How can I avoid that?

> By not using a phone, because your carrier knows this information too and also sells this data (Apple does not).

What my carrier is doing has nothing to do with the problem at hand, which is Apple collecting unnecessary data on me. Not using a phone is not a (reasonable) solution to Apple invading my privacy. I can use another phone instead, which doesn't do that.

> It's trivial to turn off Location Services on an iPhone

Let me remind you that this thread started with "iOS sends a lot of data about your phone to Apple, such as your phone number, your unique device identifier...". How can I prevent Apple from collecting my phone number? You didn't reply to that, you shifted goals to location tracking of my carrier.

Correcting an incorrect assertion is not shifting goalposts.

I don't see where an incorrect assertion was corrected. "They" was about Apple, not someone else.