How does my android device know my weather without location perms?
I've disabled every location setting I can find on the device, both general location and the specific options to share with google, and it's still giving me weather.
Are they just ignoring the setting?
You are connecting your phone to a wifi spot or honeycomb network around your places, they all have IPs, so IP is enough to tell where u live, not very accurate but enough to figure out many things.
IP geolocation using external databases that don't require permissions for the Location API.
Celltowers broadcast their location and that is enough to get a pretty good estimate of you location when GPS is disabled.
Spying is a big business and paying for forgiveness is a small price to pay over asking for permission.
If you're running the Google Play Services/Google apps package, you've already lost.