Also there’s many more settings on a phone to disable share your location for most uses vs on a car where it seems like your location goes straight to insurance companies.

On iOS you can disable it in the shutdown prompt.

On iOS there is an option to disable it until you turn the phone back on when shutting down, right under the shutdown control.

Asking the question does provide some value, because at least for me this is the first I’ve heard of the discontinuation of maintenance, and I use SearX.

Yes, most of those points are the concerns with warrant canaries. So far as we know the concept is totally untested in court so it’s hard to say what the result would be until it happens.

Updating the canary should require a human input (like a password to unlock the GPG key), which is not sometime the government would generally get access to (they make a request for data about XYZ user, and the company turns it over; they wouldn’t get actual access to the production system). The government could seek a ruling to force the company to update the canary, but as such a thing hasn’t been granted before (at least as far as we know), it’s not a guarantee. So, there is a chance that the warrant canary will serve to alert users to something happening, which is better than nothing. But because of its untested nature, it might be broken by a court.

I’m not sure I understand your point about “once it’s triggered it can’t be reset.” If a company fails to update their canary on schedule it means something happened that they can’t disclose. Once they are released from the NDA they can release a new canary explaining what happened.

That actually could be useful, by having a completely external company send a notification without action by the company receiving the warrant, it may be possible to circumvent the prohibition on alerting users.

The idea is that there is no such action as “triggering the canary” that the government can stop them from taking. Instead they refrain from updating it, thus alerting people that something has occurred. However, since the point of a canary is that not updating it raises concerns, I’m not sure how this service makes any sense (alerts on new canaries?).

The idea is that there is a big difference between the government saying “don’t tell anyone about this” and saying “you must make a false statement (the canary) every X amount of time indefinitely.” In the past courts in the US have taken a fairly dim view of the government trying to compel speech. There are some example cases at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compelled_speech#United_States.