That would be very not ok if it would happen with wifi off. I turn my wifi off to save the battery, and it wouldn't do much if it was still looking for broadcasts.
Of course Google does its usual, making it inconvenient. When you enable that setting wifi location is completely disabled and many apps which use finer location will trigger a popup to enable it back in order to get a better location.
They do this with any setting that benefits them. For example if you don't allow Google to store your historical location Maps won't remember any locations searched. As if it was impossible to maps store that details locally sigh.
For those wondering, I believe the setting is Settings => Location => => Scanning (in the the vertical dots menu in the upper right) => Wi-Fi scanning (on my Nexus 5 running Android 6.0.1, anyway.)
It's very different from when you hit "scan" and are actively sending broadcast packets on every frequency and waiting for the wifi routers to (actively) answer. Which really only happens when you pull down the list of nearby hotspots.
This simply isn't true. You'll be using power to demodulate at a minimum. You'll also be using energy to ammplify the incoming signals and a variety of other things.
Listening is actually one of the more power-intensive things a radio does, because it tends to be active more of the time than transmitting does. For many radios power consumption is the same whether transmitting or receiving.
This, is not right.
Nexus 5X, Android 7.0
Sending/receiving data over wifi takes roughly ~8x less power than sending/receiving data over cell.
If you want to save battery you need to turn off data entirely not turn off wifi. Turning off wifi ultimately costs you battery.
How did you arrive at this 8x figure? I don't think this is correct at all. See:
http://people.cs.umass.edu/~arun/papers/TailEnder.pdf
Additionally power efficiency is related to distance from the cell tower which is generally much further away than a wifi access point.
> Our measurements (Section 3) confirm that the transmission energy consumed by WiFi is significantly smaller than both 3G and GSM, especially for large transfer sizes.
Also that's 3G, not LTE which is what most everyone is using nowadays.