I saw a story on the news about a week ago about Google and location tracking. Not sure if this applies to an Apple product but I bet it does...
The reporter used 2 phones with one in airplane mode. He then went and visited quite a few locations (I think in the DC area). His phones tracked every move he made and every where he went with GPS data and sent it to Google. The only significant difference was the phone in airplane mode waited until it was out of airplane mode to send the data to Google. This is all transparent to the end user........you and me.
Denny