Trope: Police have to keep bad guy talking on the phone long enough to trace them and find their location. Professional bad guys hang up right before it triangulates their coordinates.
Apparently, Hollywood’s been getting this inspiration from a pre-digital age when they use this trope in movies. See link for more info. It’s just funny that most of the “tracing the call” scenes I’ve seen are definitely after the 2000’s.
Another link: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/10/how-hard-would-it-be-to-trace-the-sniper-s-phone-calls.html
A fun gif: https://i.gifer.com/9QtC.mp4
WhatsApp also collects this “metadata”, only the content is end to end encrypted
well of course. how else would they route the content. the only other way is route all messages to everyone and only the real recipient can decode it. that would be a data nightmare.