Nah, GPS isn't a two-way thing. There's no way for the GPS system to track devices.

Your phone figures out where itself is using the satellites as markers, the phone doesn't emit any signals for this. It's offline.

Basically the way it works is GPS satellites broadcast a very accurate time signal, (and occasionally data about the satellites exact orbit). Your phone sees this and uses signals from at least four satellites to find it's location. It does this by measuring the delay in the signal between them. (Due to the speed of light, each signal will be delayed slightly). Knowing the delay in the signal you will know how far away you are from the satellite, and knowing the exact time along with it's orbit info will tell you where exactly the satellite is. But knowing that you're 13,000mi away from a satellite doesn't help much. But then if you look at the other signals you can see you're 16,000mi from another satellite, and so on which when you use 4 satellites will leave you with one possible spot you can be.

You're inferring a tone where there isn't one.

I was asking if this is a common misconception as I had assumed the userbase here was generally pretty tech savvy, and confusing GPS with internet seemed particularly strange.

Hey don't feel dumb. There's a billion things the smartest person on the planet doesn't know.

It's a pretty clever system honestly, I found it fascinating.

You also didn't open with "how do you expect it to work" without actually knowing how it works.

There is no "uplink", eg transmission of data from the client back to the satellite.