Yes, this is why a warrant is required to access carrier location data for a phone but one is not required to have a police officer physically following you around town despite the outcome (the police get a trace of your location) being the same. Cell phone location data is too easy and cheap for the government to scale and so courts have found that it demands tighter protection.

See: https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402

It comes up fairly often here since the HN audience tends to be mostly programmers/computer people, but it's really important to remember that the law is not a series of rules a computer can directly evaluate to determine whether something is or is not legal; judges frequently use their judgement to balance the assumed intent of laws and the competing interests of various parties. I don't say this to you specifically but really just the HN audience as a whole :)