Its also incredibly buggy. I've had it drain my battery randomly.
On top of that, I noticed my maps application on my new N5 wasn't working correctly. It seemed to update once and then never again. I went into the location services and there was a EULA waiting for me to say yes to. Once I said yes, it worked, but wow, that's not how to do business. I should get that prompt in the maps app or when the phone boots up the first time. Digging through the menu system in settings is the only way I discovered this.
I work at Nuance, the Engineering Managers joke about Privacy concerns and how it is not their problem to worry about. And they are facing a log collection crisis. ie their data centers are melting with logs.
The location tracking of Google Play Services is basically a black box, that tracks the users movement very accurately.
It could be that we don't see the count of location requests Swype made, but instead the count of location requests Google Play Services makes.