just ask it not to?

That was my initial assumption about how they're collecting the location data too. However I find if I switch to a different browser it will rarely mention my location, so it could be finger printing and pulling in info from previous device session where I have mentioned my location.

I think the larger issue here is that when you ask how it knows these things it seems to have been instructed to lie and say it doesn't know and has just guessed which seem extremely unlikely. This simply isn't acceptable in my opinion.

Yeah, pretty much.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42022905

And it's still strange that after a year, it only sometimes picks it up, depending on how relevant it thinks your location is.

For me it's a coin toss whether the answer tailored to my location is useful or not; I'm often following up with something like "do not show local results, I'm shopping in the US".

But this also happens with other features: the other day it was telling me it won't access a link I pasted. Next message, I ask why. Chat answers that it can't, it has no way to browse the web. I see Web Search wasn't explicitly turned on in the conversation (not that it has mattered before anyway). Turn on for the next message and tell it to try again, voilà. Didn't try just regenerating the answer, but that also works sometimes.

This. Don’t ever trust anything it says, especially about itself or how it works under the hood

No, when memory is disabled this shouldn't be the case.