Sorry, I’m not sure why it would natter who’s fault it is when it comes to emergency services being able to locate people.

The thing is that in crisis situations, people tend to act in unusual ways. Fumbling with a phone to adjust settings while someone is bleeding out seems like an unnecessary waste of time that could result in avoidable harm. If the stress is high enough, a person could easily forget they need to turn on GPS, or even forget how. Maybe there’s a concussion involved[ and even just placing a call is a challenge, much less finding and changing phone settings. Maybe you’re unconscious, in a ditch, and some loved one is trying to locate you. They’ll be able to tell whereyou are in general, but if your phone is in a rural area, cell toner spacing can be a 3 mile radius. If you’re in an urban environment, it’s even worse - the tower spacing is closer, but urban density makes locating an unresponsive person far harder.

Being lost in a forest alone isn’t the issue; it’s being lost, hurt, and maybe unresponsive that’s the cancern. Hypothermia will absolutely fuck up your ability to think rationally; you can forget dicking around with your phone settings.

My thing is, why go to “kidnapping?” There are so many, far more likely things that can happen to a person where you’d want emergency services to be able to find you as accurately and as quickly as possible.

OP was asking about an OSS phone, right? Not one controlled by Google[ or Apple. It’s less likely that information is being harvested for nefarious purposes, and there is real value to having that information accessible to emergency services.