I want to stop using VPN on my mobile phone and use dns filtering instead to save battery life. I am worried that the few proprietary apps that i use will be able to track my location through the IP address. I know that the IP of wifi routers pinpoints my exact location, but what about the ip that i get when connected to cell data? How general it is?
And please do not confuse my question about the tower triangulation. I am asking about the location derived from IP by the apps/trackers/websites.
If you or someone else has apps with location permissions turned on and you are connected to a wifi network, the app (if it sells user data) sells the pair of location + ip to data brokers and then data brokers sell to everyone. The location gathered by the apps is exact in most cases.
Or even better - Windows can do this on PCs.
Location permissions are unrelated to IP addresses. They allow apps to use GPS, network location (calculated from a database of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers), and Bluetooth. It doesn’t use user’s IP address and doesn’t need it.
If you give an app location permission, it can obtain your location and sell it with or without a VPN an in Wi-Fi or cellular internet.
It depends on ISP’s and cell tower’s configuration I think.
Usually people connecting to the same cell tower should share the same external IP, i.e. the cell tower’s IP.
If the cell site is a repeater site, or the RBS is centralised in a data centre within city, multiple cell site might share the same external IP.
Edit: I am not sure what is the handling for the sites using satalite connection (either as a fallback or primary connection.).
AFAIK, cell network mostly dont assign ipv6 address to clients, they might have a individual ipv6 address for each client if they do so, you might want to check with your ISP for exact configuration.
It very likely varies depending on your cellphone carrier.
For the one I use, my phone is assigned a non-routable address and everything seems to use CGNAT with a few regional points where they connect to the Internet at large. This means that the external IP that my phone presents to the Internet is not very close to my actual location though it is in the same general region and it is likely shared with many other users.
I don’t know how other cellphone networks do things. But you can easily check by checking the IP address assigned to your phone (public or non-routable) and then going to a site that reports your IP address and seeing what it shows.