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That's kind of shameful. The reason they exist is for poor people who otherwise couldn't afford a phone, probably have bad (or no) credit etc. Some people do exploit them to nefarious ends. Just as some people use cash (or cars, or anything else you can think of) for nefarious purposes.
In my regular wallet a couple layers of cards is enough to block some of the door readers, and I'm not the only one. We have people standing near doors rubbing their a**es on the wall all over the place -- had, before the quarantine.
Dumb phones won't solve the problem really. Any phone has to connect with a tower. Phones almost always connect to multiple towers simultaneously. Triangulation is the trivial matter of correlating signal levels from the log produced by a couple of those towers. That's assuming you're worried about your carrier (or any other, since your phone will talk to other towers) or a government body accessing your location. Acquiring location data directly from a smartphone log makes less legwork and probably fewer court orders.. hence why law enforcement is always interested in that stuff. Personally I don't worry about any of that. I do worry about businesses (google, apple, Samsung, etc etc) having the data because typically businesses like that suck at security. Find one that doesn't have a press release about customer data being exposed in the past few years.
