I think a microwave got my credit cards!

[Jay481985]

What I wanted to say was my android phone does this weird thing, if it detects you are traveling faster than say 10 mph or so and on a highway or road route, it detects this as you being in a car. Google pings all the android phones in that vacinity as well and if the threshold is high enough or whatever parameters they put meets the requirement they can show in realtime on googlemaps that a particular stretch of highway has a lot of traffic (red) medium traffic (yellow) and light traffic (green)

That is true, that even depending on what applications you have on your cell phone will effect if it transmits or not, such as the google maps and the traffic updates as shown here. Not only that, but often time, some of these apps are always looking for updates as well and notifies you if it finds an update.

So the point is that it is very possible that even if put to 'sleep' and put in your pocket, the phone can still be transmitting intermittently. Of course, for the really anal or the tin-foil hat types, it is possible to disable that (such as putting it in 'airplane mode', but then you would not be able to recieve calls if you do that)

It is part of the android platform. I can turn it off but then google maps effectively is turned off as well which means I do not get to use gps on my gps enabled phone. Its one of those pilot programs or actually no longer pilot. The android platform makes their users guinea pigs for test apps.

Even if you turn your phone off it can still technically transmit as it never really goes off but goes into a sleep mode. It can actually be turned back on by the wireless carrier or if the police/government wants to. Even airplane mode can be defeated I believe. So the best way to if you do not want to be tracked, take the battery out.