The issue with that in his situation is 911 does not take kindly to “Hey, can you call my dad and tell him I ran out of gas?”
If it’s not a true emergency that they are expected to handle, emergency services frown on calling them.
His father’s argument is legitimate regarding needing a cellular carrier unless the poster would never unexpectedly need to contact family for help.
In answer to your question, if I’m understanding it correctly, you are still being tracked as long as you use the web. Meta has profiles for people that have never logged into facebook, used their site in a browser or used an app they control.
The profile might not have a name attached but Facebook provides a ton of websites with FB-related statistics, social widgets and more. Each of those services place FB code on the page that phones home with unique visitor information. That gets compiled into profiles that they can eventually tie to an identity when more information is compiled (as an example, your highschool friend from 15 years ago installs a Meta app like instagram and clicks ok on allowing it to dig through their contacts).
Apps and extensions like Privacy Badger, uBlockO and Ghostery help with the tracking code but I’ve no doubt that Meta spends a lot of time finding workarounds for the blocks.